MySpace has undergone its fourth major redesign in its 7 year history, as the embattled social network looks to rebrand itself as a music sharing site.
The site, now part-owned by Justin Timberlake, will offer deeper integration with Facebook and Twitter.
The new-look site features a minimalist photo-based design that aims to put music at the heart.
Users can control audio content from a navigation panel and pair photograph albums with playlists in a kind of social media mix tape.
A Discover tab within the navigation panel will offer access to trending artists, music, mixes, radio, videos, news, and forthcoming concerts. The items can be dragged into personal folders.
There is also an emphasis on what’s called Artist Pages, with the promise of lots of tracks, albums and videos.
A message posted yesterday on the myspace.com homepage promised: ‘Coming soon. The new MySpace’.
A demonstration video showed off how the new interface both deeply integrates into Facebook and Twitter while offering its own spin on communicating online.
MySpace’s was one of the darlings of the internet in the early 2000s, but faltered following a $580m purchase by News Corp in 2005. News Corp sold MySpace this June for $35million – just six per cent of its original purchase price.
As Facebook’s popularity soared, MySpace tried to re-launch itself as a music-centric online community, but never managed to reclaim its lost glory, and was stigmatised as a site where people’s profiles descended into a clash of colours and poor layout.
In a statement, the company said: ‘We’re hard at work building the new MySpace, entirely from scratch.
‘But we’re staying true to our roots in one important way – empowering people to express themselves however they want. So whether you’re a musician, photographer, filmmaker, designer or just a dedicated fan, we’d love for you to be a part of our brand new community.’
Visitors could leave email addresses to be sent invitations to the redesigned MySpace service.
According to measurement firm comScore, the MySpace audience is 54 million. This is down from hundreds of millions at its peak in 2005.
View the launch video here:
View the sneak preview of the redesign here
