MYSPACE VS.FACEBOOK

MySpace vs. Facebook Face-off by Jake Hartsfield
Jake Hartsfield is a songwriter, producer, touring sound engineer and a member of the TuneCore Marketing Team.


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MySpace and Facebook feel like they've always been around, even though both were founded in 2003 – only six years ago. The growth of both entities was incredibly fast and speaks for how quickly technology and the world today are changing. In the last year alone, we’ve seen a number of major power shifts in the world of social media networking. The biggest one being in December 2008 (one year ago) that Facebook passed MySpace in user numbers.
Compete.com reports that Facebook has grown from ~3.4 million unique visits per month in October 2008 to 23+ million unique visits per month in October 2009. Myspace, has actually declined in unique visits per month from ~55 million in October 2008 to ~50 million in October 2009. Clearly, Facebook has taken the social networking community (industry, should we call it?) by storm and is still growing in size and popularity. Yet MySpace is still the number one place people turn to for music. So, when it comes to the social networking communities and the music industry, which service is more important? Do they each play different roles in the career of an artist, or share some of the same roles? Lets look past the numbers and define what each service has become as their roles on the Internet have evolved, and the pros and cons of each.



Myspace – the Beginning
When MySpace was first launched, it grew to become the largest social networking site – most of the users were individuals and used MySpace to connect with friends, plan parties, etc. MySpace was also one of the few sites offering free accounts that allowed bands to sign up and host their music. As MySpace grew in numbers, it also grew as the leading place to look for new music – and when you heard about a band, the first place you looked to find them was MySpace. Even bands that had official websites began using MySpace – if you didn’t have one, you might as well not have existed. If you were looking for a particular band, you knew they’d be on MySpace and you also knew that their page was going to have a music player easily located in the top-right side of the page. This dependability made MySpace a more reliable source for music than artists’ official websites. Every artist’s official website is unique, which means their music player could be anywhere, and it’s usually hard to find – if they have one at all.
The customization that MySpace allowed was very appealing to all users, especially bands. You could make your page exactly the way you wanted it (if you could figure out the html).



Facebook’s Appeal
1. Ease of Use, Networking - In the early adoption of Facebook, people immediately noticed how easy and simple creating a profile was. There was no need to learn html or spend time finding a free pre-made layout to make it look good. It was also much easier to find people, because users were actually encouraged to use their real names.
2. Clean and Organized - A lot of people actually liked how much cleaner and simpler Facebook profiles appeared as opposed to MySpace. With people trying to customize their profiles on MySpace, it was hard to find people’s information, and there was a lot of poorly programmed html, which caused a lot of bugs and unreadable pages.
3. Dynamic Interface - Sharing information was so much easier on Facebook that it prompted people to use Facebook as a platform for sharing ideas and connecting instantly with people on a national scale. It allowed people to be creative and use groups to discuss politics, sports, form organizations, and raise money.
4. The Status Bar – This utterly simple concept encouraged people to visit each other’s Facebook pages more frequently to see what they were doing. The inherent power of the status bar should be apparent after the tremendous hype we’ve seen with Twitter.
5. Less Spam – Facebook – from the beginning – has had much less of a spam problem than MySpace, due to heavy policing by the site admin and Facebook users’ intolerance for it.
These innovations that trumped MySpace in usability and popularity caused the paradigm shift in personal users from MySpace to Facebook.



Why MySpace still holds the spotlight for music
Facebook was not originally intended to be a music website – when it was growing in popularity, in still did not have working music players. Some applications were slowly introduced that allowed people to play their own music on their profile pages, but it didn’t allow bands to create pages. Bands could make fan groups, but couldn’t play music on the actual pages.
MySpace was still everyone’s #1 destination if they wanted to hear music – and the plus side was you didn’t have to be a member of MySpace to visit a band’s profile.
Facebook soon gave into the pressure to give bands profiles on Facebook and introduced pages, which allow bands to have music players, tour calendars, photos, videos, etc. Even with these new options, bands couldn’t customize their profiles the way they could with MySpace, or organize their content exactly the way they wanted it. Facebook became a useful addition to a band’s online presence, but was not the necessity MySpace was.



Similar Features
When Facebook introduced advertising, allowing bands, companies, and individuals to advertise anything they wanted, they offered something that MySpace didn’t have for bands. It was understated, and not as many bands caught on at first as did the larger companies that were using Facebook. Following Facebook’s lead, MySpace tried to make advertising on their site as easy as it is on Facebook…The most obvious difference is that Facebook has a much larger, deeper, and easily-targeted demographic of users, which makes advertising incredibly easy and effective. MySpace has lost most of its personal users, so most of the people looking at the ads are other bands… [Facebook +1]
It’s difficult to create & invite people to events on MySpace, and it’s incredibly easy on Facebook. Creating event pages with fresh media (photos, videos, links) is easy on Facebook. It’s also harder to get the same fan response and interaction on MySpace… [Facebook +1]
MySpace was an easier website to point people to, because everyone was assigned their own URL, defined by their username. Facebook matched MySpace earlier this year when it started allowing people to grab their own URL’s…[draw]
Facebook still doesn’t allow customization of pages, which limits an artist’s creative expression. MySpace lets artists program their page as if it were a completely unique website, allowing artists to feature videos, graphics, and advertisements in whatever form they want…[MySpace +1]
The new google search is beginning to include music results at the top of the list when an artist’s name is searched – it pulls this information primarily from Myspace and Lala. [MySpace +1]



The Verdict
While Facebook is certainly the best place for an artist to advertise and interact with fans, it lacks the appearance of a personal website that MySpace has, and the music player is secondary to the news feed on the page. On MySpace, the music player is the focus of the page, and far more artists have MySpace pages than have complete Facebook pages.
I know of industry folks who will look at a band’s MySpace page before looking at their actual website – (1) to listen to their music, and (2) to see how many friends they have. Yes, the number of MySpace friends you have is still relevant in the industry today. It probably not as accurate as the number of fans you have on your Facebook page, which are much more accessible than your MySpace friends, but it still adds credibility.
I think as more bands begin to adopt Facebook pages and focus on building their fan base through Facebook, the number of fans on a band’s page will carry more weight than the number of “friends” on MySpace. For now, MySpace is still very relevant in the music industry, so I’d recommend having both a strong MySpace and Facebook presence. MySpace for music, Facebook for fan interaction.