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It amazes me everytime that nobody made a better alternative for MySpace yet. They can't win because everything new they make is really crappy. Two recent examples: they are the place with more concert listings and still their new "I'm going to this show"-thing is really weak and focused on selling tickets instead of giving a good user experience (can't find shows by venue, etc); the new music player reminds me of old 90's, I believe it's a step back.

The alternative is really easy to create: it's a place where you can upload your songs for free and use open graph from Facebook for comments, etc, because bands are now trying to slowly move to Facebook. That or Facebook gets a better way for artists to customize their pages.

How do their concert listings compare to Songkick? (I'm a huge fan of Songkick, by the way...)

Which then leads me to think... long-term development for Songkick could include bands taking control of or having access to their Songkick page?

Facebook is not an alternative. More and more people refuse to use it.
I think this is fairly short sighted - they've got a lot of people to lose before they become irrelevant and they're still in a growth curve.
And nobody joins it anymore?
In the USA you allegedly have last.fm, but that's pretty much useless if you're in the rest of the world; like me (Europe) and the guy who wrote the post (Australia).

I agree, though: MySpace is no longer a social networking site, but rather, a music artists site: I guess over 99.9% of any active artists has a page there as I've only encountered 1 artist (and not a famous one) who didn't have a MySpace home page, in years.

MySpace should focus only on the musical artists, and dump everyone else. I often feel annoyed when I search for an artist on MySpace and I find an ordinary user has taken up his name for a totally uninteresting page about himself.

True, sadly. I'd donate money just to see this giant spamhole gone, better: replaced by a successor.

Every bit of value a myspace profile might have is destroyed by a crappy design, misused fields, "thanks for the add" messages and just plain advertisement anywhere else.

We have nice stuff out there already, Soundcloud (nice player), Last.fm (band info), Bandcamp (most awesome sales platform)... I'm unexpressable eager to see someone creating the myspace killer with them.

Crappy design + too much irrelevant advertising + incredibly slow load times.

The next version definitely needs to take the best elements of all of those services but initially it needs simplicity and I think the Sixty One guys are almost there.

bandcamp ftw.
As a musician myself, I really want someone to do something about this. Soundcloud has some of the important features down (eg. a music player that's not shit, unlike Myspace's), but they really need a customisable/brandable artist landing page to really take over the space. I know its far beyond what they are trying to be, but to me they seem like the closest to actually reaching the critical mass to make a go of it (at least in the electronic/dance music area).