The Death of MySpace

Before Facebook ruled the internet, before Instagram defined aesthetics, and long before TikTok dictated our attention spans — there was MySpace.
It was loud. It was chaotic. It was personal. And for a fleeting moment in the mid-2000s, it was the center of the digital universe.

The Golden Age of Customization

MySpace launched in 2003, offering something revolutionary for its time: a personal space online that you could truly make your own. Users could upload music, post photos, write blogs, and — most importantly — customize everything. Backgrounds sparkled, text blinked, autoplay songs blared the moment someone landed on your profile.

You weren’t just a username; you were a web designer, DJ, and personal brand — long before those titles existed.
For many, it was their first taste of self-expression on the internet.

By 2005, MySpace had more than 25 million users. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation took notice and bought it for $580 million, betting it would define the future of media. For a while, it looked like they were right.

The Fall Begins

But the social web evolves fast — and MySpace struggled to keep up.
The platform’s cluttered design, buggy interface, and slow performance made it increasingly frustrating. Meanwhile, in a dorm room at Harvard, Facebook was quietly building something sleeker and simpler.

By the late 2000s, users began jumping ship. Facebook’s clean layout, real-name policy, and exclusivity gave it an air of sophistication that MySpace lacked. What was once a creative playground started to feel like a digital ghost town.

Murdoch’s media empire failed to innovate, focusing more on ad revenue than user experience. By 2011, the company sold MySpace for just $35 million — less than 10% of what it paid.

The Lost Music, The Lost Memories

Perhaps the saddest chapter came years later. In 2019, MySpace admitted that during a server migration, it had accidentally deleted over 50 million songs and untold photos and blog posts — wiping away a huge piece of early internet history. What was once the digital diary of a generation had effectively vanished.

Why MySpace Mattered

MySpace wasn’t perfect — but it was pioneering. It gave independent musicians like Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen their start. It introduced millions to HTML and CSS (even if they didn’t know that’s what they were doing). It turned the internet into a space for identity and creativity, not just information.

In many ways, MySpace walked so every platform after it could run.

The Legacy Lives On

Today, when we scroll through Instagram grids or curate our Spotify playlists, we’re echoing the same desire that made MySpace special: to express who we are in a digital world.
Even though MySpace as we knew it is gone, its DNA runs through every major social network that followed.

MySpace didn’t just die — it evolved into the internet we live in today.