MySpace to relaunch (again) as music hub

After a few tranquil years of Facebook and countless glorious Twitter beefs, it’d be easy to forget our social networking roots: MySpace. But there’s at least one person not content to leave the site dead and buried, and that’s A-Trak. In an article for the Huffington Post last month, the producer lamented the hole in the music industry the passing of the former social networking goliath has left.

“I run a record label, Fool’s Gold. We signed a great deal of our artists simply based on their MySpace pages. If I heard about a DJ, rapper or band, I would type out myspace.com/theirname and get their full list of tour dates and venues, their pictures, a glimpse of their aesthetics from the page design, their popularity and of course listen to their songs.” he began. “What website gives you all that info today? None! No wonder I haven’t signed anyone in 2012.”

Well, it looks like A-Trak’s prayers may have been answered: MySpace has announced that it plans to undergo a new relaunch later this year, but rather than fruitlessly trying to claw-back the social networking audience, they’re aiming to reposition the site as a music destination. Of course, it’s not the first rebrand MySpace has (unsuccessfully) attempted. Around this time last year, the site announced its intent to compete as a music hub with the likes of iTunes, Spotify and Vevo to no avail. However, given it’s got *NSYNC’s leading man Justin Timberlake at the helm of the reinvention as Creative Director, MySpace may yet regain some of its cool. Probably not, though.

Still, there’s a legacy beyond capturing the glittery aesthetic of mid-2000s web design we have to thank MySpace for, and that’s A-Trak’s remix of Boys Noize’s track Oh!. “I saw him DJ in Miami one year and although we ran in different circles back then, I wanted to tell him that I loved his set and was a fan of his work so I wrote him a message”, A-Trak wrote in his article Mourning MySpace. “We spoke a couple times and he asked me to remix one of his songs. The whole thing was set up on MySpace.” Still, the new MySpace probably has a better chance of succeeding than Google+.