Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Exclusive: Here’s Myspace’s New Pitch: Music, Youth Culture and “Steadied” Traffic

Today and tomorrow, Specific Media-owned Myspace is at Advertising Week — with investor Justin Timberlake in tow — to pitch its new agenda to marketers. The company declined to make execs available for interview or describe what it is announcing (in fact, it objected to us calling this week’s appearances an “announcement”). But we did finally get our hands on a new Myspace deck.

Update: Specific Media clarified that this was not meant to be viewed as a pitch deck, and instead described the presentation as “supporting/background materials meant to be used to supplement discussion.

Specific is telling marketers that the new Myspace’s vision is “to become the #1 online community music destination”; its mission is “to feed the energy of youth culture everywhere.”

Myspace traffic has “steadied,” boast the new owners — though the charts in the deck only extend till July of this year. The core of their pitch centers on Myspace’s pre-existing music deals.

Specific Media calls Myspace “The Hulu of Music,” with “unique content rights with Big Four labels and 20K independent labels [which] allows for ad-supported music video and audio streaming.”

As for what Specific Media is doing to change and improve Myspace since buying it in June, there’s a screenshot of a beta version of a “social playlist” running down the right rail, and an unattributed assertion that video consumption on Myspace has doubled in the last 30 days.

There’s also an odd flowchart/“virtuous cycle” diagram to explain the product vision, as pictured above.

Here, see for yourself:

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Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.

— Author Tim Kreider on not getting paid for one’s work