Cyborg music stalkers rejoice, the powers that be at MySpace have finally given the site a long overdue extreme makeover.
Unveiling the new look this week, they’ve gone for simplicity and consistency over star spangled banners and confusing html code. With a new focus to keep ‘on the pulse’ of what’s going down in popular culture, it appears to be part Facebook, part Twitter, part GetGlue.
“The new colour palette is black and white,” Mike Macadaan, MySpace’s VP of design and user experience told The Music Network magazine. “It is very neutral. We did that deliberately so that the content and the artists really stand out. It a very minimal, simple and cleaned-up design approach.”
Nick Love, MD of MySpace Australia, adds, “By allowing too much latitude to customise pages, we lost control of the user experience. If you don’t focus on offering a great user experience, people just don’t stick around. Part of the problem is that there really hasn’t been a new approach to design on the site ever.”
Courtney Holt, president of MySpace Music, adds, “Historically MySpace didn’t have predictability or a simplified user experience. Because it covered very broad interests, the product kept getting bigger. This was an effort to make it both smaller and more functional so that the key things we are trying to get consumers to and the key things that we are trying to get consumers to do are front and centre. So the site is intuitive, it is clean, it is predictable and it is fast.”
Myspace users are now offered a broad array of tools on the one site, particularly when it comes to music, an aspect which has been the saving grace for the site since the advent of facebook and twitter. A ‘discovery tray’, shows what is trending in real time, users can earn badges by suggesting or discovering artists, buy tickets to shows and see which of their ‘friends’ are attending. The bridge between artist-fan is also being shortened, with new inititives for increased interactivity between the two. A big emphasis has also been placed on users as ‘trend setters’ across all aspects of entertainment and not solely music, explains Holt; “I look at this as an aggregate destination of young people interested in pop culture, music and content,” he concludes. “In a world where content is somewhat atomised and content lives all over the web in small places, we need people to come together around shared interests. There aren’t a lot of places that are optimised around these shared interests with content and pop culture at the centre. We are an agnostic platform that will respond to the needs of the network.”
The new and improved MySpace was launched last night and will be available to all users worldwide by the end of November. Will it reconvert faceblorg hags and tweet freaks? You tell us, internet fiends…
