15 Million People Have MySpace Mail Accounts
January 27, 2010
Back in the summer MySpace launched its own email service called MySpace Mail. The company has now announced that it has surpassed 15 million accounts for that service.
"Adoption by our users has experienced phenomenal growth, well exceeding initial expectations," says MySpace's Rajit Marwah. "At launch we set a goal of 10 million accounts created within a year – we knew we were on to something when we surpassed this goal in less than a quarter."
"What really makes MySpace Mail unique, and one reason why we think it has resonated so well with our users, is that it builds on your existing MySpace identity," he says. "We decided early on to automatically reserve our users’ vanity URLs for use as their MySpace Mail address. For example, since I had the URL myspace.com/rajit, the address rajit@myspace.com was already waiting for me when I created my MySpace Mail account. With an adoption rate upwards of 70%, vanity URLs were already one of the most popular features on MySpace, and leveraging them allowed users to maintain their identity on MySpace while enhancing this footprint beyond the MySpace network."
MySpace Mail MySpace Mail | MySpace Video |
The ability to send and receive music and videos as attachments with MySpace Mail could be one of the main attractions to users. Music and videos are certainly a huge part of what draws many users to MySpace in the first place.
MySpace's foray into email drew plenty of criticism, but with better than expected growth, MySpace doesn't appear to have any regrets about it.
MySpace has also announced the beta launch of My Music 2.0, a hub where users can build and manage social playlists. More details about that can be read here.
Have You Read This?
> 10 Reasons Social Media isn't Replacing Email
> MySpace Launches New Music Charts
MySpace Buys imeem, Rolls it Into MySpace Music
December 9, 2009
MySpace announced today that it has completed a deal to acquire "certain assets" of the popular social media music service imeem. imeem is now redirecting to MySpace Music.
"MySpace Music and imeem share a common vision and commitment to further enabling the socialization of content across the Web," says MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta. "This deal will allow us to leverage imeem’s industry leading technology and over time, meaningfully integrate their products into the MySpace Music experience."
"Since its inception in 2003, imeem has built a highly engaged music community of more than 16 million users worldwide," says Van Natta. "imeem helped pioneer the ad-supported digital music model and created the Web’s first embeddable music and video playlists enabling users to embed songs and playlists virtually anywhere on the Web, including MySpace."
MySpace will be taking on imeem CEO Dalton Caldwell, CTO Brian Berg, COO Ali Aydar and VP of Sales David Wade as consultants to help manage the transition. Financial terms were not made available in the announcement. Mike Arrington says it's less than $1 million.
MySpace says that in the coming weeks, they will be working as quickly as possible to take aspects of imeem and migrate them to MySpace Music. The company says they'll be working to offer users the imeem playlists they created.
Have You Read This?
> MySpace Music Launches In The UK
> MySpace Reaches Deal With Another Music Label
> MySpace Launches New Music Charts
MySpace Music Launches In The UK
December 4, 2009
MySpace is continuing to make big strides on the music front. Or more accurately, the social network has made a huge, across-the-Atlantic leap, as late yesterday, MySpace Music launched in the UK.
A MySpace representative explained in an email to WebProNews, "With this launch, MySpace Music brings to the UK all of the functionality currently available to U.S., Australian and Kiwi based users including an ever-growing catalogue of fully licensed audio and video content from both Major and Indie artists, user-friendly e-commerce solutions, personal music players and user and artist playlisting, in addition to monetization opportunities and access to comprehensive analytics and charts tools for all artists."
MySpace Today Trailers | MySpace Video
All in all, it's something for people on every side of the equation to get excited about.
Artists including Alicia Keys, 50 Cent, Florence & the Machine, Kasabian, and Nelly Furtado are providing videos and playlists. Other interesting entities, including the Vatican and Katie Price, have also contributed. This, in turn, should give users a lot of fun stuff to play with. (Side note: the Vatican has great taste, endorsing both Muse and Mozart.)
And this an important moment for MySpace, too, of course. Launching a product in a new market isn't something that's done lightly, and since MySpace did so where Facebook is especially dominant (Hitwise estimated that Facebook received one-seventh of all UK page views in September), a lot may be riding on MySpace Music.
Have You Read This?
> MySpace Reaches Deal With Another Music Label
> MySpace Launches New Music Charts
MySpace Reaches Deal With Another Music Label
November 21, 2009
So it's quite noteworthy that, according to Andrew Orlowski, a Merlin spokesman stated, "After more than a year of negotiations, MySpace Music has finally offered Merlin a deal that is acceptable to its members, members who represent 10% of the global music market."
What's more, "The same eligibility and level of participation will be offered to all independent labels licensing content to MySpace Music."
Of course, the details of the arrangement haven't yet been made public, which leaves a lot of questions unanswered. But it looks like MySpace, which acquired Imeem just yesterday and launched MySpace Music Charts the day before, is really on a roll on the music front.
