In 2005, MySpace was the most visited website in the United States. Not Google. Not Yahoo. Not Amazon. MySpace. A social networking site that let users create profiles, add friends, post bulletins, and - most memorably - customise their pages with garish HTML and autoplaying music.

It’s easy to dismiss MySpace now as a footnote, a punchline, something that existed before the real social media platforms arrived. But that framing misses the point entirely. MySpace didn’t precede social media. MySpace was social media. It invented the template that every platform since has followed, modified, or reacted against.

How It Started

MySpace launched in August 2003, created by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe at eUniverse, a Los Angeles-based internet marketing company. The timing mattered enormously. Friendster, the first social networking site to gain mainstream traction, had launched the previous year and was buckling under its own success - the servers couldn’t handle the traffic, pages took forever to load, and the company kept making unpopular design decisions that frustrated users.

Anderson and DeWolfe saw the opening. They built MySpace as a direct Friendster competitor, but with a crucial difference: they gave users far more control over their profiles. You could customise your background, change your fonts, embed videos, add music players, rearrange your layout. If you knew HTML and CSS - or could copy-paste code from one of the many “MySpace layout” sites that sprang up - you could make your profile look however you wanted.

This was both MySpace’s greatest strength and its most enduring flaw. The customisation made it feel personal and expressive in a way no previous website had managed. It also made browsing MySpace a visual assault. Blinking text, tiled backgrounds, auto-playing songs at maximum volume, cursor trails, embedded flash animations - visiting someone’s profile was like opening a door and not knowing whether you’d find a gallery or a circus.

The Music Connection

What truly set MySpace apart from Friendster and the other early social networks was music. MySpace allowed bands to create profiles, upload songs, and connect directly with fans. For independent musicians, this was revolutionary.

Before MySpace, getting your music heard meant playing local gigs, mailing demo CDs to radio stations and record labels, and hoping someone would care. MySpace collapsed that entire process. A band in Tucson could upload three tracks and be discovered by listeners in London the next day.

Arctic Monkeys became the most cited example. The Sheffield band built a massive online following through MySpace before they’d released a single commercial recording. When their debut album dropped in January 2006, it became the fastest-selling debut album in UK chart history. The music press called them “the first band to emerge from the internet,” though they were really the first band to emerge from MySpace specifically.

They weren’t alone. Lily Allen, Kate Nash, Calvin Harris, and dozens of other artists used MySpace as their primary promotional platform. Record labels started sending A&R scouts to MySpace instead of nightclubs. For a few years, the MySpace band page was the most important venue in music.

The Peak

MySpace’s growth between 2004 and 2007 was staggering. Monthly unique visitors went from 1 million to over 100 million. In July 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought MySpace’s parent company for $580 million - a figure that seemed astronomical at the time but would soon look quaint compared to later social media valuations.

At its peak, MySpace was genuinely central to youth culture. Your Top 8 friends list was a source of constant social negotiation and drama. Who made your Top 8? Who got bumped? The anxiety over these rankings was a precursor to every form of social media status anxiety that followed.

Profile songs were identity statements. The song that auto-played when someone visited your page was a carefully chosen signal about who you were (or who you wanted to be). Changing your profile song was an event.

And “Tom” - Tom Anderson, co-founder - was everyone’s first friend. He appeared in every new user’s friend list by default, grinning from his famous angled selfie. He was arguably the first internet celebrity whose fame came entirely from being embedded in a platform’s infrastructure.

The Fall

MySpace’s decline is one of the most dramatic in internet history. Between 2008 and 2011, it went from dominant to irrelevant. Monthly visitors dropped from over 100 million to under 25 million. In 2011, News Corporation sold it for $35 million - roughly 6% of what they’d paid six years earlier.

What happened? The standard narrative is simple: Facebook happened. Facebook offered a cleaner, more uniform experience. No garish custom profiles. No auto-playing music. A consistent, predictable interface that loaded faster and worked better. Facebook also required real names and started with a college-educated user base, which gave it a more “respectable” feel that attracted older users and, eventually, advertisers.

That narrative is partly true, but it’s incomplete. MySpace also suffered from serious internal problems. After the News Corporation acquisition, the site was increasingly driven by advertising revenue targets rather than user experience. Pages became cluttered with ads. Feature development slowed. Technical debt accumulated. The site became slower and buggier while Facebook became faster and smoother.

There were strategic missteps too. MySpace was slow to launch a mobile app, which proved fatal as smartphone adoption accelerated. Facebook invested heavily in mobile early and made the transition smoothly. MySpace never really caught up.

What MySpace Invented

MySpace’s legacy is embedded in every social media platform that followed, even if few of them acknowledge it.

The concept of the personalised profile - a page that represents you online, with your photo, your interests, your connections, your content - that’s MySpace. Friendster had profiles, but MySpace made them expressive and central to the experience.

The integration of music and social networking - that’s MySpace. Spotify’s social features, SoundCloud’s artist pages, Bandcamp’s community tools all trace back to what MySpace demonstrated: that music discovery works better when it’s social.

The friend list as social currency - that’s MySpace. Facebook’s friend count, Instagram’s follower count, Twitter’s follower count are all descendants of the MySpace Top 8.

An AI consultancy I’ve spoken with made an interesting point when discussing early platform dynamics: MySpace was also one of the first platforms to demonstrate how user-generated content and algorithmic curation interact - though in MySpace’s case, there was very little algorithm involved. Discovery was manual, social, and serendipitous. The shift toward algorithmic feeds came later, with Facebook and then Twitter, and fundamentally changed what social media was for.

The auto-playing profile song was arguably the ancestor of TikTok’s entire model: short-form audio as identity expression.

Even MySpace’s failure was instructive. It taught the tech industry that social networks have network effects that cut both ways - they help you grow fast, but when users start leaving, the same effects accelerate the decline. Your platform is only as valuable as the people on it. When people leave, the remaining people have less reason to stay.

The Afterlife

MySpace still exists, technically. It relaunched as a music-focused platform in 2013 with Justin Timberlake as a co-owner and investor. The relaunch generated brief attention but never gained traction. The MySpace brand had become synonymous with obsolescence.

In 2019, MySpace admitted it had lost 12 years’ worth of user-uploaded music - approximately 50 million tracks from 14 million artists - during a server migration. The loss was devastating for researchers and archivists, and for the countless independent musicians whose early recordings existed only on MySpace.

That data loss is perhaps the most fitting coda to the MySpace story. The platform that gave an entire generation its first experience of online self-expression turned out to be impermanent, fragile, and ultimately disposable - just like the internet itself can be when nobody takes preservation seriously.