I wish I had a dollar for every time "MySpace came up in a conversation at DIgital Hollywood. Recently, I've met or seen a lot of companies that are trying to emulate MySpace, or VCs looking for the next MySpace. For instance, I heard Napster will be rolling out a Web-based experience, which I'm sure will include a community and social networking aspect. This makes a lot of sense -- they already have features where you can view others' playlists but all of these are in their closed system accessible only through their downloaded app.
MySpace did a brilliant job of catering to indie bands and using each band's base of users to bring new ones in and to inter-connect with one another. Like MTV used music videos to lure users into their lifestyle, so MySpace has used music and related content to extend their network. Most impressively or tragically, depending on your viewpoint, they, like MTV, did it without paying the labels!
Update: Ironically, a contact wrote to me yesterday, who hadn't read this post, saying that he was working on something that would "put MySpace out of business"...actually turns out to be a very interesting idea!
If your contact would be interested in talking shop with a Stanford graduate student with a strong interest in social networking and online communities, have him drop me a line. I'm thinking of something similar.
Posted by: J. | September 28, 2005 at 07:01 AM