MYSPACE'S battle with Facebook is over and the News Corporation-owned website is focused on a "fundamentally different" experience by providing entertainment content, its chief executive has revealed.
"I really don't view Facebook as a competitor,'' Owen Van Natta said. ''I personally have a Facebook account and I use it to communicate with my friends and my family. And I have a MySpace account that I use primarily to interact with other people in and around content."
MySpace introduced music features for artists and fans this week, part of an effort by Mr Van Natta, 39, since joining the company in April to focus on building entertainment programming.
A former chief operating officer of Facebook, Mr Van Natta is trying to reverse what the researcher eMarketer projected would be a 14 per cent fall in advertising on MySpace this year.
He is building the MySpace user experience around the "socialisation'' of entertainment, partly by leveraging exclusive licensing deals with the world's biggest music labels.
Videos and online games are also a focus. MySpace Music Videos will be a clearing house for videos from record labels, with artist catalogues, user recommendations on what to watch, a browsing tool and a video player with "Buy" buttons. Videos from the MySpace catalogue will be played on other social networks including Facebook as a result of the company's recent acquisition of the online music-sharing service iLike. A new MySpace Artist Dashboard will provide a free data and analytics tool for musicians.
"The licences we have through our partnerships are different from everybody else out there," Mr Van Natta said.
Moving away from a rivalry with Facebook was the right strategy, said Charlene Li, an analyst with Altimeter Group. "Redefining the game is very smart. MySpace is much more focused on the content around entertainment, lifestyles and interest areas around music, film, eating out and play. The social networking side of it is a bonus."
Bloomberg
