Myspace comeback

The new Myspace was officially made available to the public yesterday.

Now without the capital S, new owners Tim and Chris Vanderhook, both of digital media company Specific Media, hope the updated site will bring social media's first success story back to its glory days.

The brothers describe the redesign as a "community-led development process", which saw Specific Media collaborating with users to ensure the revamped offering featured the tools and applications the public wanted. "It's a completely human-programmed experience," says Tim. While the Vanderhooks note that music is now a key driver of Myspace, they stress that the new Web site goes beyond music and is largely geared towards creative individuals.

The relaunch sees Myspace introducing an iOS app, bringing a much-needed mobile element to the Myspace experience. The free-to-download app includes a music-streaming service called MyRadio, which relies on Myspace community members, who include several popular musicians, to create actual radio stations, Tim says.

"We've given everyone on our platform their own radio station," says Tim, adding that users can become DJs by simply programming what they think people want to hear. "It's for regular people all the way up to Justin Timberlake," Tim adds - an interesting addition, amid Apple's recent debut of iRadio and as other established brands make their move into streaming services.

The Myspace application also boasts a GIF maker, for the creation and sharing of GIFs. Noticing the popularity of GIFs, Chris says they wanted to make this animated image format easily accessible to its users. "As easily as you can take a photo, we're including a way for people to create their own GIFs," says Chris.

Specific Media bought MySpace for just $35 million in 2011, a fraction of the $560 million News Corp paid for the company six years earlier. Talk of the emergence of a revamped Myspace surfaced at the end of 2012, when the social network went online as a music-focused service, supported by pop star Justin Timberlake, who is also an investor in the company.

Once the world's most-visited social networking site, the Vanderhooks face a significant challenge to change the public's perception of the platform. In 2011, the sentiment towards the brand was mostly negative, says Chris. "But if you look on Twitter today, it's over 80% positive. And we're not doing any marketing - just focusing on a product that serves the artistic community."

This may not be entirely true, as yesterday's unveiling was accompanied by a $20 million advertising campaign, according to AdWeek. The costly campaign is set to run across broadcast, radio and digital platforms. One of the broadcast campaigns features a group of beautiful people dancing around and smashing instruments, while a rock band plays in the background. Celebrities Pharrell and Mac Miller make guest appearances in the ad. Myspace's head of marketing, Christian Parkes, describes the chaotic commercial as an attempt to represent the type of people who make the Myspace brand.

With just 30 million global monthly users at present - compared with Facebook's 1.1 billion - Myspace has a long way to go should it wish to again become a dominant force in the social media market.