Get ready to once again pick your Top 8—and one of them better be Tom.
More than 20 years since Myspace launched, making and breaking friendships and allowing users to show off their music taste, the site’s owners Chris Vanderhook and Tim Vanderhook confirmed they’re planning to relaunch the platform.
“We still own Myspace,” Tim told Tommy Avallone’s new documentary, Myspace “We are stewards of the Myspace brand at this point, and we are going to relaunch Myspace. We’re just waiting for the right time to do it. And if that one doesn’t work, we’ll do it again.”
After all, Myspace never technically disappeared, and over the years many different owners have tried to revamp and relaunch the platform to its former glory—including Chris and Tim.
In fact, when the pair bought Myspace in 2011, they spent two years planning a complete redesign to be largely music-focused, though it failed to pluck at the heartstrings of users.
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“We built an entirely new Myspace,” Chris explained in the doc, while Tim added, “We really tried to modernize it, but it was a different company at that point. It wasn’t the same Myspace.”
No, it was not. As Chris points out in Myspace, the social platform “had been through four other sets of management and CEOs” before he and his brother signed the deal to take over.
“I think that there were a lot of the people who were really just done,” he added, noting that “the minute the deal closed, things just started unraveling. Everything that could go wrong, goes wrong.”
Among the series of unfortunate events was every advertiser cancelling their contracts, allegedly preferring Facebook to Myspace.
As Tim put it, “It became just an onslaught of losses.”
But for those of age in the aughts, Myspace was more than just a social media platform—it was a way of life.
From curating a publicly displayed Top 8 friends list to choosing which song would play when people clicked into your profile, the platform—where everyone was co-founder Tom Anderson’s friend—was wildly popular in a time when the Internet was still finding its footing.
In fact, Adeleeven credits Myspace with helping launch her career. After her friend Lyndon(whom she affectionately called “Mr. Myspace U.K.”) uploaded a demo of her music to the site, it blew up.
“I was on it from, like, New Years Eve 2004 and it blew up because of Lily Allen and the Arctic Monkeys,” Adele told E! News in 2008. “My best friend Jack was in Lily’s top friends, Lily was huge, and then I got spotted like that. That was literally it.”
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