News Corp. has announced plans to sell MySpace. Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey said that “now is the right time” for a “under a new owner.”
Whoops. “We screwed up by not paying attention and now we want our money back”. Is that what I hear them saying? If so, the money may not be there.
MySpace tried to make changes this year (a crappy ground-up redesign), but the crowd had already left the store MySpace owns. News Corp. should have saved their money with that facelift. People now meet up in a different place, a friendlier address, called Facebook/Twitter/Linked-in.
Almost half of MySpace’s staff was served pink slips at the beginning of 2011, reducing overhead. This piece of the company is bleeding money. So they are selling.
Who’s gonna buy? Is there a value to MySpace? I can’t see anything worth more than a few pennies on the MySpace once-proud-but-ugly dollar. Is there a value for musicians to host songs to share with their fans? At one time (two years ago), there might have been. But the fans are gone from the site, and there are others places that more elegantly serve the MySpace music purpose.
Let it die peacefully. It served us all well back before we knew any better. And even then, we could tell it was wonky and looked like crap.
But is was the only social thing we had. Like a first car; a piece of shit, but we loved it at the time. Got us where we were going.
Now, we can’t believe we drove that thing, with the old radio, ugly paint job, crappy heater and the noise coming from the engine. We look back and laugh at the car. And at MySpace.
Good luck selling what’s left. To me, it’s not much. But I am sure there is some technical innovation the fellas at Facebook would pay a couple pity millions for, right?