1. Welcome to MySpace

Published Mar 16, 2023, 11:03 AM

The MySpace era was incredibly influential, and incredibly messy. And it remains largely underexplored. Young people talk about MySpace like a cool scene they wish they could have experienced. Like CBGB, or Studio 54.

But before we get into the experiences that users had — from bored teens to up-and-coming musicians to soldiers stationed abroad — let’s start at the very beginning. Because MySpace does not have a typical Silicon Valley origin story.  

Special thanks to our guests Julie Angwin (author of Stealing MySpace) and Taylor Lorenz (author of the forthcoming Extremely Online). You can share your MySpace story with Joanne McNeil on Twitter @jomc.



My Space used to be the most popular website in America. It launched in two thousand and three and peaked in two thousand and eight with over one hundred million users. At the height of its popularity, a quarter of a million users were signing up for new accounts every day. Most of the people on the site were young, in their teens and twenties. It was at the center of their social lives. I'm twelve journey routeen. I'm currently thirteen. I'm turned fourteen September twenty six. I'll be fifteen October fifth, fifteen. Anyway, I'll need to comment on my pitch cut. I'll take cute pitch out. Some of you all want to get to know me lea meet friend request, because I approve all of them. My name is Joanne McNeil. I'm a writer who has covered internet culture since the early days of social media. I have watched social networks rise and fall, and of all these companies, MySpace has always struck me as the most fascinating, and my fascination is shared with a lot of people, including many who were too young to even have been on it. I wrote a book called Lurking, a History of Social media since the beginning of the Worldwide Web, and in my research I kept coming across young people talking about MySpace like a cool scene that they wish they could have been part of, like CBGB or Studio fifty four. Part of what draws me into MySpace is the era MySpace launched in the early aughts, when suddenly the Internet was very fast, people transition to broadband connections after slow dial of ISPs. Another part of it is the ulture. With this increased bandwidth and speed, you could share pictures and music files much more easily than before. Users did this on MySpace. When my Space launched, social media was an unknown quantity. People had no idea how to make money off of social networks, or even if they could make money off of it, and the consequences of social media had yet to be seen. Issues like surveillance and harassment became more complex. As users transitioned from a largely tech space to Internet experience to image based social media. Things shifted with MySpace, including some positive new directions. Because MySpace offered Internet users something new, the possibilities of how to act on it felt endless. Space offered opportunities for people to express their creativity, and meet people in ways that felt thrilling and maybe a little bit scary at the time. Someone could be posting from their parents' house in the suburbs one minute and become a superstar musician the next. Oh yeah, that's another defining feature of MySpace. The grown ups weren't there. The social network often felt like a house party throne when someone's parents went out of town. For better or worse, teenagers say MySpace is a great way to express yourself. Police, however, call MySpace a predators buffing and now for our next story. For some people in cigarettes, for others gambling, but for millions of teens, their newest addiction is MySpace. June sixth, two thousand and six or six six six came and went without Satanic groups waging war against Christians, but the incident left school officials wondering how to deal with problems arising from conversations on the popular website MySpace dot com. But MySpace could also be a lifeline. People use MySpace in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to keep in touch with friends and family members after they evacuated Louisiana. Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan use the social network to stay connected with people back home. MySpace was all of these things because MySpace wasn't just Tom Anderson and Krista Wolf, the co founders of the social network, or Rupert Murdoch who acquired it, or even Tila Tequila or any of its other famous users who might now be called influencers. It was a place where millions of people could connect to one another. I think each platform comes kind of synonymous with time and culture. So you know, there's like the vine era, or like we're in the TikTok era now, or like Instagram, And I think my Space was kind of like this thing that felt very relevant at least in certain worlds in the mid two thousands, but it lost that relevance pretty quickly because it couldn't ultimately like scale up to be mainstream like Facebook. That's Taylor Lorenz, Washington Post tech reporter, an author of Extremely Online, a forthcoming book on influencers. After I spoke with Taylor, she sent a tweet out to her followers asking who had memories of my Space and if they would share. These responses give you a glimpse of people's feelings and memories about the social network. I can remember being just out of college, my first job and just agonizing over who to put in my top eight college friends. People from hell, new work friends, just complete nonsense. I was the perfect age. When my Space came around in high school. It was the first time we realized there were kids just like us in other towns. It opened up, so I got sent a bunch of anonymous messages over my Space as a team that were like nice and affirming, and they felt kind of magical, and I would respond to them using my profile page. The anonymous messenger later revealed that they were my psychiatrist. And I think I was fifteen. With a hundred million users, there are hundred million stories you could tell. So what was my Space? What drew people to it? Why aren't people using it anymore? And why do people who weren't even born when my Space launched feel like they missed out on something special. We'll explore all that in this series, and we will take you back to that moment, which was incredibly influential and messy, and it remains largely under explored. You have to keep in mind everyone was making up the rules on the fly. This is true of the users, and it was also true of what was happening inside the company itself. Everyone was figuring out MySpace in real time. What happened in the MySpace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow. But before we get into the experiences that users had, from musicians to soldier stationed abroad, let's start at the very beginning. MySpace does not have your typical Silicon value origin story. Its founders weren't typical startup guys, and the success of MySpace back then it seemed just as unlikely. If you were on MySpace, I bet I can get asked the name of one of your friends, Tom Anderson, that Tom MySpace Tom. Tom was everyone's friend. If you sign up for a MySpace account, Tom would appear on your friends list automatically. You couldn't see people unless you had a friend and Friendster was first, and we were trying to compete, so when people signed up, they wouldn't see anything. That's boring. So I put myself as this person that could connect everyone else, so you'd see people right when you signed up. That was the idea, and it worked because Tom looked friendly in his profile picture. He looked like a normal indie rock eye from La. He even shaved a few years off his age to make him seem like part of the young crowd on the site. I mean, Tom is like such an interesting guy because he does seem like he was sort of a creative spark behind MySpace. He certainly was an emotional heart of it, and he was a very private person but also very experimental. That's Julia Anguin. She's an investigative journalist at the founder of the Markup. The company first came on her radar after News Corp acquired it in two thousand and five. My Space wasn't the first social network, and we'll get into some earlier examples like Frontster and black Planet in our next episode, but it quickly surpassed these competitors. So back in two thousands, I was beat reporter at the Wall Street Turtle and my beat was news Corp. I was supposed to just cover Rupert Murdox company, and and that's how beats were at the journal, you just really focused on a big company like news Corp would have one dedicated reporter. And so I actually hadn't really heard of MySpace until News Corp bought it, and I remember I had to write up the acquisition. It was announced late in the day and I was scrambling and I was shocked at how popular it was. I was like, what is this thing? Later she wrote a book about the company at the fallout of this acquisition, Stealing my Space, which was published in two thousand and nine. The story of my Space was about a bunch of people who were really not that good at what they did, but we're successful. These guys were just really good marketers. They were really interested in my Space as a way to get to meet with bands and go and meet cool girls and go to clubs, and so it was definitely a party atmosphere. The characters behind my Space were intriguing to Jolia Sugar up in Silicon Valley, hearing about these coding geniuses and entrepreneurial legends like Steve and Was. The MySpace founders were very different. They were not the crowd I was used to in Tich, which was bunch of engineers who went to Stanford and had a brilliant idea and then started, you know, a little startup on Sandhill Road. Right. They were Los Angeles party dudes. Tom Anderson had founded the company with Christa Wolf inside a Los Angeles space startup called e Universe. Before my Space, Tom had worked for Chris as a copywriter and product tester at another startup. Tom was a musician. He went to film school and dabbled in the hacker community as a teenager. You could definitely say Tom was entrepreneurial. He had some experience running a porn website too. Cristal Wolf, who had worked in sales and marketing, was the one who came up with a name like seemingly everything about MySpace. It got its name haphazardly my Space. It was just sort of on a flip. It seemed like a good deal. I think it was five thousand dollars. Company that was going bankrupt was selling it and decided to buy it. Came up with the idea from MySpace, and we're just scratching our heads for what a good name could be, and we came up with all these crazy names that were really ridiculous, like commingo, and then it was just sort of this moment, Oh yeah, we bought the url MySpace a year ago. Let's use that Chris had bought the domain name from a former client, an online storage startup that one bust, and had been sitting on it to understand how it all happened, why Chris and Tom would make a play for social media in the first place, and how they went on to build America's most popular website on the opts, it helps to know some of the backstory on Euniverse, the company where my space was founded. My Space was just one of many little projects at this company called e Universe, which was an early kind of crappy e commerce company that did all sorts of garbage right. They sold vitamins that were definitely sketchy, and they did like these pop up ads that were really gross and like they were in all of these spaces that were kind of like the underbelly of the Internet. Back then, people called this spyware or adware. It was a real nuisance. E Universe had products they offered as free downloads, like animation that would make your cursor look like an American flag. But if you downloaded one of their animations, it might trigger pop up ads, little websites that could follow a user around as they served the web. In two thousand and two, e Universe, what would become the MySpace pairing company, was holding on as one of the few survivors of the dot com crash. It's worth remembering like this was after the dot com boom and bust, So there had been this huge build up where everyone was like, Oh my god, the Internet's gonna be still amazing, and all this money raced in the early two thousands, and then it just blew up in two thousand and one and collapsed. And basically from two thousand and two to two thousand and eight or so, people talk about it as like the Internet Winter, where there was not really a lot of investment because people were like, uh, we got burned on all these companies like pets dot com that really didn't turn out, and so there wasn't a lot of investors, and so the people who survived were people who came up with these kind of scrappy, underbelly kind of businesses, and The Universe was one of those. E Universe, which would later be renamed Intermix, was not without its critics. In two thousand and five, the company was sued for its practices distributing spywear to unsuspecting users. Elliot Spitzer was Attorney General in New York and he was pretty aggressive in setting up an Internet Prosecution Bureau. At the time, there weren't a lot of attorney generals who were Internet savvy or who had started bringing cases against Internet companies, because the Internet scene was still very nascent right and wasn't necessarily seen as interesting targets. Some of the first ones he brought were against the predecessor companies of Intermix and Universe. This was the year before Elliot Spitzer was elected Governor of New York and three years before his big scandal as Governor of New York. Very very briefly, Spitzer had a rendezvous with a sex worker named Ashley de Prey. After the scandal broke, he resigned as governor in two thousand and eight. Ashley to Prey, by the way, had a pretty act of MySpace page, including music tracks, and at the time, gossip columnists were poring over Ashley's page. But let's rewind back to Elliot Spitzer, the then New York Attorney General who was cracking down on spyware. Spitzer was doing important work. He really helped start this movement to raise concerns about the safety of my spaces platform. Intermix settled the lawsuit and agreed to seven point five million and penalties over three years and to stop distributing adware programs. The case was unusual because the way people talked about user privacy back then was different. The advocates at that time in the privacy space were mostly focused on government surveillance, so there was a lot of focus on the National Security Agency and police surveillance, but the privacy community wasn't really focused on corporate surveillance because there really wasn't that much of it at that point. Her investigation into my Space as a Wall Street Journal reporter was a turning point in Julia England's own career. My Space was when I first learned about the issue that we call privacy, that I like to call data exploitation. It occurred to me that basically what they were telling was they were giving you their users free software. Previously, if you wanted to set up a website for yourself, you would go buy software at a store. Back then, it still cost like sixty dollars to buy some software and you'd get a box that we shrink wrapped. You take the CD home, you'd load it up, and then you could build something. You could build a webpage. But they were basically giving users that for free, and the way the users were paying them was with all this information that exchange data and information from users for a free online service from a company is a more commonly recognized trade these days. In rest prospect, I would say that the legacy of my Space is actually the pioneering of this business model of monetizing user data. While at e Universe, Tom and Chris had at their disposal the company's database of over thirty million email addresses. They had all these email addresses to announce this new social network from their windowless office near lax And this social network, MySpace, was the perfect project for this internet marketing company because it meant that the emails of everyone who signed up with a new account could be added to the database. Tom became the president of MySpace and Chris became its CEO. Tom Anderson, as Everyone's Friend, had at one point over one hundred million online friends, but CHRISTA. Wolfe kept to study one hundred and seventy seven friends. Still neither of them owned this company. Their lack of independence presented a problem. Space was a subsidiary of this parent company Intermix and MySpace they had some autonomy because they ran the site themselves, so the founders of it, you did have that feeling that they were their own company. But Intermix had basically the option to buy MySpace as part of the legal contract. In two thousand and five, when MySpace was seeing enormous traffic sixteen million visitors a month, the biggest social network in the world was sold to News Corps. It was the head of Intermix who negotiated the deal. Essentially, they were able to exercise that contract, that ability to buy out Myspace's shares without the knowledge or consent of the founders of MySpace. And so they basically did the secret deal behind the acts of the founders with River Murdock to sell MySpace from out from underneath the founders, I mean tragically. Like as a reporter who covers technology and has covered Silicon Valley for a long time, these kinds of things happen, I mean more frequently than you would think, because you know, founders setting up their companies. You know, just there's a lot of people who prey on their inexperience and add clauses. And that's a classic thing that investors do is put in you know, legal language to give themselves options. Because the fact is the investors and Intermix wanted to cash out. They didn't want to wait for you know, MySpace was like, Oh, we want to be like the vibe of MTV is our vibe and like all this vibe stuff. But the investors just want their money, and they want the most money, and so they set up the terms so that they had the ability to execute when they wanted to. Chris and Tom were each thirty million dollars. They left the company. In two thousand and nine, News Corps brought in a new CEO and its own people and really took over the company. The way Richard Rosenblatt, CEO of Intermix, pitched the company to Rupert Murdock is instructive and how it captures what people thought of social media. In two thousand and five, Rosenblatt sold MySpace as a self sustaining entertainment business. Julia has a great quote from their exchange in her book. Yeah, I want to read this quote because it's actually such a great quote that he said to Rupert Murdatt. Mister murdat, MySpace is the perfect media company. Unlike traditional media companies, MySpace generates free content through its users. It generates free traffic by its users inviting their friends and all you have to do is sell the ads. It was user generated content old media, meaning before and four you had to pay to produce a film or fund the recording of an album. But in the eyes of investors, social media generated itself because there were users hanging out on the platform. You didn't need money to produce a film or record an album. The content is populated on its own just by being active there. People would watch and listen and get glued to what happened on the website, at least in theory and in theory when people were actually hanging out on my Space. It seems like Rubert Murdoch wanted to just find a way into the Internet, right. He was like, I've got all these things. I've got satellite TV, I've got cable TV, I've got newspapers. But the future it's going to be the Internet, and so I want a foothold there. And he was not wrong, right. My Space was in some sense like an interesting play because it was a really hot, fast growing social network, and he was not wrong. The social networking was going to become big. But what happened was, of course Facebook ate their lunch, and so it was maybe the wrong social network to bed on but you know, he had kind of had a fifty fifty shot there because my Space and Facebook were the two top ones, so he at least directionally grabbed, you know, in the right direction, even if he sort of picked the wrong one. Julia Anglin has a quote from Rupert Murdoch and her book forecasting that my Space was on track to be the biggest mass platform for advertising in the world. Well, you know, it's funny about Murdoch's quote, right, Like he's just describing Facebook, right, They're the biggest single mass platform for advertising in the world. So he wasn't wrong that there was potential there. It's just that in the end, I think the engineering, the lack of engineering expertise and talent, and the lack of focus on an abilities to outcompete on actual quality of the product is what doomed my Space to fail against Facebook. And so even though I say that this marketing genius and hucksterism is important, you still have to have that underpinning of the great engineering and the great talent. And that was the thing that ultimately undid them was that they didn't have that. This unraveling happened very soon after Julia's book was released in two thousand and nine. By the time I finished reporting the book, I pretty much knew they were not gonna succeed. And it was actually mostly because of the news Corp acquisition. There was so much turmoil and almost all mergers fail, like that's just a rule of merger life. And then it is also true that news Corp didn't know how to compete, right, because the thing is, this is this giant media company and they have this hot property, but it's locked in this battle with Facebook, and this is something that requires strategic thinking, like should we clean up the nightclub or should we just double down on that and compete with Facebook on that. MySpace had neither the edge of a New York City digital media startup nor the loose libertarian spirit of Silicon Valley. The social network felt chaotic and open and a free for all sense, much like the city where it was founded, Los Angeles. They made the Internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub, like I feel like a cool place and also slightly dangerous. My Space felt cool because, however massive it was, it was still a youth oriented and with various scenes and clicks. It felt very niche. Plus Internet culture was not yet mainstream. Here is Taylor Lorenz. Again, my Space was notable and it was big, but it wasn't TikTok size, right, Like, it was still relatively small, and the Internet was so much smaller that I think, you know, people that were big on the platform couldn't really scale out and achieve like mass fame because my Space culture was not like the Internet culture was not mass culture in the two thousands, and so it just they were sort of inherently niche and all of this was happening before there was viral content, before algorithms filtered what Internet users would see. Yeah, I think that now with algorithms, it just we take a lot for granted modern Internet users that are younger, that never had to operate on sites like my Space to sort of expect the most engaging content to be delivered to them. And it's just something that you know, was not the case back in a day, like you had to kind of really hunt around for different things. There wasn't like a for you page that you would consume content on my Space through to kind of to find it. It was the start of something new through my Space, we can see how the modern Internet came into being. More to come in our series Main Accounts The Story of my Space this season on Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace, it almost seemed like an extended party, like an extended digital party. And these investors in Silicon Valley said black people and the Internet. Back then, it was like your place to be weird. It was like your place to like show the like freaky or like alt side of yourself. It hit me as trobably like Crichino was like, oh my god, guys super racist. The MySpace data loss is something that I always put in air quotes. I have no faith that this was done accidentally. Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on my Space because it turned out was actually not a good business. Main Accounts The Story of my Space is written and hosted by me Joanne McNeil, editing its sound design by Mike Coscarelli and Mary Do. Original music by Alice McCoy, Mixing and mastering by Josh Fisher, Research and fact checking by Austin Thompson, Jocelyn Sears, and Marissa Brown. Show logo by Lucy Kntonia. Special thanks to Ryan Murdoch. Grace Views and behead Frasier. Our associate producer is Lauren Philip, our senior producer is Mike Coscarelli, and our executive producer is Jason English. If you're enjoying the show, leave us a rating and a review on your favorite podcast po form Sadly, my MySpace page is no longer around, but you can find me on Twitter at Joe Mick. Let us hear your MySpace story aunts check out my book lurking Maine Accounts. The Story of MySpace is a production of iHeart Podcasts.

Main Accounts: The Story of MySpace

MySpace was the first major social media company. And it was the first major social media company to 
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