The appointment of Own Van Natta to CEO of MySpace was supposed to solidify the online music site as a key promotional partner with the big 4 record companies. One is left to ponder MySpace’s future with the sudden replacement of Van Natta with not one but two co-presidents: former product manager Jason Hirschhorn and former COO Mike Jones. Is this a signal that MySpace is trying to search for the solution to its problems internally or do its problems loom so large that it will take two captains to turn the ship around? And, will their tenure exceed Van Natta’s 10-months?
Hirschhorn and Jones will be challenged to make MySpace’s vision to combine social networking with sharing & recommending music a reality in the shadow of Facebook’s eclipse. The numbers according to comScore are not so optimistic: 112 million unique visitors for Facebook compared to MySpace’s 57 million with an average of 27 monthly visits compared to 14 respectively. And, that’s without Facebook having a music service! The chasm should widen even more now that Facebook has opened its platform to outside developers to create its music space. And, let’s not forget about the Twitter piranhas taking big bites out of MySpace with top drawer musical artists utilizing it for fan communication.
Whether or not Hirschhorn and Jones can move MySpace forward and beyond the CEO revolving door distractions remains to be seen.
Tags: comScore, facebook, Jason Hirschhorn, Mike Jones, MySpace, twitter
February 27th, 2010 at 9:00 am
Did the site lose it’s lustre by forgetting about all the indie artists who basically
helped build the site?