Myspace appears to have thrown in the towel, with news that it has developed an application which will allow artists to transfer all the content on their Myspace profile onto Facebook, under a new “Music” tab on their fan pages. Myspace was originally developed as a means of bands easily sharing music with their fans as much as it was a social networking site, and the fact that Myspace has decided on a ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ approach indicates that the News Limited owned company, which Rupert Murdoch bought for $580 million in 2005, has given up on competing with Facebook.
The new music page will be a challenger to RootMusic’s Bandpages application which is one of the most popular music applications, attracting 150,000 artists in just a year. Bandpages aims to make their music applications as ubiquitous as Myspace used to be for bands, but they still have a way to go to catch up with Myspace, which has 14 million artist profiles. The site’s integration with Facebook will only allow artists to manage one profile, which will appear on both Myspace and Facebook.
It’ll also automatically update any changes. Artists who move their Myspace to Facebook can also then get access to traffic and streaming data from both sites (something BandPages doesn’t yet provide) as well as obtaining fan management and communication tools.
