MySpace

There's a version of internet history where MySpace wins. Where Tom Anderson remains everyone's first friend forever. Where News Corp's $580 million acquisition in 2005 proves to be the steal of the century rather than a cautionary tale. Where bands still compete for Top 8 placement on their fans' profile pages. Where the autoplay song that greeted you on someone's page—that sonic assault of unmuted Panic! At The Disco or Taking Back Sunday—remains the dominant form of online self-expression. That version of history didn't happen, obviously. Facebook happened instead. But for a brief, glorious, chaotic moment, MySpace was the center of the social universe, and it left scars on everyone who lived through it.

For indie rock, for emo, for metalcore, for hip-hop, for electronic music—for basically every genre that wasn't being adequately served by mainstream media—MySpace was the great equalizer. Arctic Monkeys became the fastest-selling debut act in UK history largely through MySpace hype. Lily Allen built her career there. Soulja Boy put "Crank That" on MySpace before anywhere else. The platform's music player, embedded on artist pages, became the primary discovery mechanism for an entire generation. You could put your band's songs online and anyone could listen. That seems obvious now, but in 2005 it was revolutionary. Before Spotify playlists, before YouTube rabbit holes, before SoundCloud rappers, there was MySpace.

The profiles themselves were exercises in maximum expression. Unlike Facebook's clean uniformity, MySpace let you customize everything—background images, fonts, colors, layouts, embedded players, glitter graphics, auto-playing videos. The HTML and CSS knowledge that millions of teenagers developed trying to make their profiles look cool was probably the largest distributed programming education in history. Sure, the results were often hideous—seizure-inducing color schemes, unreadable text, pages that took minutes to load—but they were *personal* in a way that no social platform since has allowed. Your MySpace page was your digital bedroom, decorated exactly how you wanted, no algorithms involved.

The decline happened faster than anyone expected. One moment MySpace was the most visited website in the United States, bigger than Google; the next it was a punchline. The reasons are well-documented: technical debt that made the site sluggish while Facebook shipped features weekly; spam that flooded the platform; a redesign in 2008 that alienated users; News Corp management that tried to extract advertising revenue rather than invest in product; the mobile transition that MySpace completely fumbled while Facebook mastered. By 2011, when News Corp sold for $35 million—a 94% loss—MySpace was already dead, it just hadn't stopped twitching.

The site still exists, reimagined as a music-focused platform that nobody uses. A 2019 server migration accidentally deleted 12 years' worth of user-uploaded music—50 million songs by 14 million artists, an entire era of independent music simply erased. That loss haunts me. Somewhere on those servers were the first recordings of bands that became important, the demos and experiments and evidence that something was happening before anyone noticed. MySpace taught us that social media could launch careers, that online communities could matter as much as physical scenes, that your profile could be your identity. We learned those lessons and then moved to a platform that took away all the fun customization. Maybe that was the right trade-off. I'm not sure anymore.