Myspace is still the place every music artist needs to be.

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.

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.

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).