Is the new Myspace a radio replacement?

The New Myspace is the latest social 'audio' network to have a 'radio' feature that can decide the music you hear based upon your musical taste and the top artists that you connect with on the social network. We’ve already seen services like Pandora Radio and Spotify who claim that they are not cannibalising radio but surely a number of radio listeners will switch to socially enjoying music with their friends on services like the New Myspace?

The Way Music Sharing Has Been Until Now

Spotify was quick to integrate with the Facebook Open Graph and make listening to music a truly social experience. If you’ve connected your Facebook and Spotify accounts you can no longer hide potentially embarrassing music choices such as Gangnam Style showing up in the Facebook real time feed ticker. However it is still difficult to find and share music with your friends on Facebook and inside the Spotify app. To access these features requires plenty of digging that most users won’t do and I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a ‘your friend listened to’ story appear in my Facebook news feed.

How Myspace Will Change The Way We Enjoy Music

The New Myspace makes sharing music easy. When you sign up and start listening to tracks they automatically populate your feed with content and make a beautiful collage of what you’ve been enjoying. You can connect to music artists (similar to a Twitter ‘follow’ or Facebook ‘subscribe’) and what is even more interesting is that you can also connect to specific albums and tracks too. It’s also the same method to connect with any user on the New Myspace. You hover over an icon with two rings and click to connect the rings. When you hover over a user you can instantly see their top tracks along with a percentage affinity rating based on the music you’ve both listened to, your shared connections and activity on the social network.

If you’re using the New Myspace it is likely that you’ll be listening to music for the entire duration of your visit. There’s a player at the footer that will allow you to start songs playing inspired by your favourite track, artist or music genre and, unlike other streaming music services, you are able to listen to any track you choose for free. How will Myspace make money from offering so much musical content to their subscribers? Time will tell but it is certain that they will be able to mine a large amount of data by offering such a quality service for nothing except for your name, email and all of your musical tastes. There are possible ecommerce opportunities for artists to sell their tracks directly to users with a cut going to the New Myspace.

How Will New Myspace Affect Radio?

The old MySpace has always been a place for independent artists to show off their portfolio and become famous online. New Myspace will take this principle one step further by allowing anyone to signup as a musician and upload ‘tracks’ and ‘albums’ that anyone can potentially hear in their non-stop radio streams. You’ll be able to discover new and emerging bands and connect with them. Traditional radio has never been very good at showcasing new bands. As a previous boss of mine said, “it doesn’t bring enough listeners”. Radio has always been about bringing in as many listeners as possible by sticking to a very targeted niche of popular music and this social network will be the opposite you’ll listen because you can discover new music you’ll like.

The one thing that the New Myspace can’t (yet) take away from radio is the ability to connect the music tracks all together with a friendly radio presenter and jingles designed to match the music you’re enjoying. Without these elements it is simply a personal jukebox that knows music you’ll enjoy. As James Cridland mentioned in his article about last.fm data the New Myspace could, with time, become a great resource for music programmers in search of the next big songs to playlist.

What’s Good About The New Myspace

It’s possible to create ‘mixes’ in the New Myspace which could be a combination of your top photos, music tracks or videos. It’s also a great place for audiophiles and audio creators to congregate as it makes sharing audio social. You can discover what’s hot and trending on the service or simply perform a search using the rather large search bar. You can get connected directly to music artists and discover new talent. A really cool feature is that you can become a ‘top fan’ of any artist by sharing and listening to their music enough. Perhaps, in the future, music artists will be able to reward their ‘top fans’ with prizes such as free concert tickets, in person meetings and merchandise.

The user interface is clean and ‘new’ looking (it’s a bit like Google+) and you scroll from left to right instead of up and down to view your feed. Personal profiles are much cleaner and do not allow you to change the whole layout of your page as you could before. Type in a bio, location and website (plus choose your top 8 friends - a hangover from the old incarnation) then upload your avatar, profile photo and you’re done.

Remember to set your ‘profile song’ this is your top track that you want to showcase to the world. If you’re a radio presenter it would be easy to sign up as a creator and upload a demo showcasing your talent and then set it as your own profile song.

The future is all about sharing the music you love with people who matter to you. What do you think about the New Myspace?