MySpace competitive with FB thanks to music offerings?
It seems to be the week of PR for me. I was also recently quoted in an Associated Press article picked up by Businessweek discussing MySpace and its music strategy as a way to be more profitable. The article focuses primarily on tastemakers and their importance while also discussing the new MySpace music player which allows users to queue multiple songs and have several different playlists streaming at once. The reporter asked me several questions about social media, why traditional ads don't work on social networking sites and how best MySpace can compete with Facebook. Below is an excerpt from the final article:
"Either you can see a message from a friend who's just broken up with you, or you can see a random ad. Which would you choose?" said Shiv Singh, a vice president at digital advertising firm Razorfish.
Because of this dynamic, growth is slowing for social network ad spending, which is expected to rise 10 percent this year to $1.3 billion, eMarketer estimates. Social media sites are expected to have 3.9 percent of the overall online ad market in 2013, down from 5 percent today.
MySpace certainly does have its fair share of challenges but its certainly making all the right moves in the music space. It leads in that category and with its new CEO hire will probably extend that lead too. But the more fundamental question is whether music is strategic or significant enough to fend off the Facebook onslaught. I would argue that it isn't and nor are the cosmetic changes to the MySpace experience. It needs another music like category or deeper, more powerful social interactions reaching into new (think older) audiences to compete.
Without that, it'll keep losing users to Facebook and then its only a matter of time before Facebook catches up in the ad dollars game too.
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