YouTube to MySpace: YouSuck!

If you're in a hurry, you can simply read the boldfaced text...

By Fred Mills

Although MySpace has been the go-to destination for bands and musicians for some time now - particularly independent artists without the web muscle of a big label or marketing firm - anybody who frequents MySpace knows what a ghastly user experience the site provides. First and foremost is the turtle-like pace of the pages loading; in the time it takes for all the front-page content - photos, videos, music player, blog section, etc. - to appear for a typical MySpace account, you could have investigated the band via its official website, its Wikipedia page, and a half-dozen fan sites. Factor in the general clunkiness of navigation for MySpace, which involves image-loading freezing up a page, the scroll bar operating as if it were an epileptic having intermittent seizures, and the standard music player which looks like it was designed by an unreconstructed fan of 8-tracks, and you've got the aforementioned user experience being akin to hopping in the Wayback machine to the years when 26k dial-up was the norm.

It's no wonder users have been leaving MySpace in droves and landing at Twitter and Facebook. Admittedly neither platform really provides what MySpace does, but Facebook at least comes close enough (it's hard to find what you want on Facebook pages, but the content is there if you look close enough, and FB is lightning fast), and Twitter's immediacy as a communication tool is nearly without peer.

Mindful of some but apparently not all of this, MySpace recently announced it was going to give itself an overhaul in order to remain relevant. In a story at USA Today titled "Once-fading MySpace focuses on youthful reincarnation," Co-president Jason Hirschhorn claimed that there is a "pulse of pop culture on MySpace. It is the place where 100 million people congregate, and hundreds of thousands sign up every day."

That may be, but the pulse has been getting weaker by the year, and even though MySpace remains pretty profitable, they realize a serious rebranding is in order and they have already released new user home pages while getting ready to move heavily into social networking by adopting some of the Facebook and Twitter conceits.

However, as the article also points out, according to market researcher Debra Aho Williamson, of eMarketer, "For months we've heard about the company's plan to refocus on its historic roots in music and entertainment. But the turnaround has been painfully slow, and this shakeup will only reinforce the perception that MySpace can't be fixed."

Into the breach steps YouTube. According to reports at both the Los Angeles Times and Wired, YouTube, which is owned by Google, is announcing a new program designed to merge the worlds of independent music marketing and social networking. They're calling it "Musicians Wanted," and as the LAT puts it, "The program targets independent artists, offering them an easy way to create their own home page, or channel, on YouTube and share in the ad revenues generated by their videos. Until now, YouTube has offered the revenue-sharing option only to artists who have contracts with record labels or who have special contracts with the video-sharing site."

Wired adds, "YouTube employees who decide which applicants get accepted to the YouTube Partners Program will now be on the lookout for indie bands. If they're accepted, they'll get to add tour dates and "buy" links for music and merchandise and exert further control over the design of their pages, in addition to receiving "a majority" of the advertising generated from pre-roll, text and overlay advertising on a monthly basis... To make participating bands easier to find on YouTube, which ingests over 20 hours of video every minute, the site will gather them into a browsable, searchable section dedicated to independent music."

Wow. Sounds a lot like what bands have been trying to do at MySpace for some time. And not without some success, either. But one imagines that YouTube, with the Google muscle behind it, might be able to make the deal work faster and more efficiently for all concerned - including the aforementioned users who, after all, are the folks bands are trying to reach. It must be annoying for a band to hear that someone got frustrated with their MySpace page and decided to navigate away from the page as a result.

There's a lot more too this of course (namely, a lot of monetization issues), so check out the above links to the two reports cited. The bottom line is that the cyber-wars (apologies for the Web 1.0 terminology) have begun anew, and with any luck, the bands and the fans will be the beneficiaries this time around instead of collateral damage.