Hard as it must be for Rupert Murdoch to swallow, News Corporation’s acquisition of the social networking site, MySpace has been a colossal failure.
It was the US’s most popular networking site in 2006, then something happened. Something that all the business brains at Harvard can identify, but still can’t quite harness or reverse. Facebook – set up by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, ironically – stole its crown.
There was a time when you couldn’t open a newspaper without finding a chart-topping band or artist whose raw talent had been uploaded and immediately discovered like the Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, and legions of other ingénues who’ve since fallen by the wayside. MySpace was literally a goldmine and News Corp. quickly set up MySpace Records to capitalise on the undiscovered talent still waiting to reveal itself.