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The company I work for (Josephmark) was hired by MySpace to redesign the site and create something radically different. The interface you see was created by a few talented designers, the video you say was staged is definitely not staged. What you are seeing is what the new MySpace will look like when it's ready to launch. Yes, the site is focusing music - the new MySpace is going to be a social music platform because it has always and still is MySpace's biggest strength (they have access to more music and videos than anyone else), when you have more music than Spotify it would be crazy to try and target a different niche. it has been mentioned by MySpace themselves in interviews about the new site it's a music product. MySpace are not trying to compete with Facebook, if anything their new competitors are now Spotify, Last.fm and Rdio. The very fact you can login with your Facebook is proof of this enough.

The new MySpace is very much a music product. It has a fresh, crisp interface and it's smooth, sexy & fast. It's the fastest and best performing MySpace by far. What you see is the impressive work of the MySpace development team who have done an amazing job at taking ambitious designs and turning them into something captivating and interactive.

Don't judge the site people until you try it. From a developer perspective, I think most people here on HN will appreciate how technologically advanced and smooth the new MySpace is which has been built from the ground up when it's launched. As you can see it's more than a mere re-skinning of the old MySpace code base.

Tell Ben I said hi :D Good job mate.

I have to say as a fellow designer.

Great work!

It looks stunning I hope it works as well as it looks cause that is probably more important than the visual aesthetics.

Thanks mate, I'll pass the praise on to the design team. I'm on the dev team here, so my involvement hasn't been as great as theirs. The response from the video seems to be pretty positive, hopefully everyone is just as impressed when the final site is ready for the public to use. I am a bit biased here because I'm proud of the work my colleagues have done, but it definitely is one of the nicest looking music products out there.

Visually I think it's rather pleasing. It's different and the horizontal scrolling might not be everyone's cup of tea, but screens seem to be getting wider so it makes sense that sites start adopting a more horizontal oriented approach to web design to accommodate larger resolution screens.

I do find it kind of ironic the design team use Mac's and people are saying that the new MySpace looks like it got inspiration from the Windows 8 Metro / People Hub, haha.

I think many mac geeks (myself included) are secretly loving the MS design aesthetics given the heavy focus on typography :)

Now to track down and murder the designers of Ribbon and we can start building a new UX utopia >_>

> It's different and the horizontal scrolling might not be everyone's cup of tea, but screens seem to be getting wider so it makes sense that sites start adopting a more horizontal oriented approach to web design to accommodate larger resolution screens.

It seems very tablet like. Side scrolling isn't a big deal on a touch device. Not sure how I'd like it in a browser with a mouse that only scrolls one way, but the video looks nice at least.

I for one can't read Facebook's timeline and that uses downward scrolling. I don't quite get why I find it so difficult. I really can't get on with it. I'm fine with one column (but two - is a complete mind warp for me.)

It's probably an alignment issue with my brain scrabbling to differentiate content.

I'm also a fan of paging over scrolling. So it will be interesting to feel how this works. Perhaps scrolling with the finger lets you focus better than scrolling with the keyboard or pointer.

It looks great. You guys are really pushing the design/interface envelope.

It would of been fresh to my eyes, but I previewed Windows 8 first. Myspace looks like they took Windows 8 metro design principles into play.

I watched the video and immediately thought that this thing was miles ahead. Can't wait to try it :)

I just wanted to chime in and say that the space that MySpace once dominated is an entirely different one now.

MySpace is the underdog here. They will have a very hard time convincing people to join them.

I've used SoundCloud since 2008, when it was invite only and mainly known on obscure electronic music production forums. Sure, way back in the stone age musicians and producers used MySpace, but most of us were happy to get away from it as far as we could the moment an alternative appeared. SoundCloud is minimalist in nature. It focuses on the music. That's why it wins. MySpace started to look like GeoCities.

Nowadays MySpace is a wasteland, you have some big media content and thousands of dead accounts.

Arctic Monkeys were the poster child of a successful MySpace band and their last login was over a year ago.

And anyways, judging from the new look, the new MySpace still focuses on looks. Do we need another big content outlet? Shit, if you are into pop music you've probably already subscribed to VEVO's YouTube channel.

Virb tried to pull a MySpace and they failed.

Soundcloud + Bandcamp offer enough for most musicians. Add Facebook, YouTube and iTunes and most users will be happy too. Why would we need anything else?

Am i wrong in saying that Myspace seemed to stay relevant for longer than it possibly should have purely because musicians and bands seemed to have an affection for it, for whatever reason? I know that even up until recently, when i've searched for local musicians, their Myspace page is still very high in search rankings, and i still often (somehow) find myself listening to local band's music via Myspace.

If they're going to put a focus in any area, for a redesign, it seems like music is the ticket.

As far as website designs go, this preview is stunning, even if it is just a mockup.

...because musicians and bands seemed to have an affection for it, for whatever reason?

You mean distribution agencies have an affection for it. Myspace has been around forever, so it comes up high on Google, so the guys in charge of putting St. Vincent's music online maintain her Myspace account in addition to her Facebook, iTunes, etc. The artists themselves don't really care, they just want to be everywhere that ears and eyeballs are.

As far as this preview goes, it looks very much like Windows 8. You can tell there's people still just throwing money at the Myspace name, which surprises me. I thought it was pretty much a dead brand.

There's nothing wrong with looking like Windows 8 at the moment!

Maybe it's okay to visually look like windows 8, but functionally it's looking like a complete disaster.

How so?

Let's wait and see. Keep in mind, the video is pretty frenetically cut. The video is designed to provoke awe, but I suspect the interface is less "out there" in practice.

The only functional problem with windows 8 metro I find is it's exclusiveness. I think windows 8 has a terrific UI for an application, just not for an OS. Give me windows 7 desktop where on the press of the windows key I get a windows 8 metro overlay like steam/xbox 360/ps3/etc, and I'd probably love it.

Musicians like myspace because you can customize your homepage. And it's accepted to send invites to random people. On Facebook you don't have either of these. Also they added music friendly features such as letting users select your tune as their homepage theme song. As a musician I've found Myspace to be invaluable.

I think they face stiff competition from soundcloud. But a big problem with soundcloud is the amount of spammy bands that comment on songs and the lack of casual listeners like on myspace.

Customized homepages, random invites, and homepage theme songs: you basically just outlined the main reasons I stopped using Myspace.

As a musician, THIS can not be said enough!

Autoplaying music on any page, even a bands is a bad idea.

The big advantage of Myspace (for me) is that I can access the songs of bands much easier without logging in.

I still don't have a Facebook user - and myspace worked for me all the time without a user, but Facebook didn't work. It's the - "hey there is a show with some bands I don't know, let's go on Myspace and check them quickly out" - that Myspace excelled in. No login, just listening to some of their songs, maybe watch some pics, check out their tour dates and that's it.

But they have lost their edge - now everyone is on FB. But most of the bands still have a (mostly) unused Myspace profile.

I don't know why, but for some reason I felt that, while reading your comment, you were for some reason biased towards wanting to find faults in MySpace's announcement.

Just because the UI is staged, it doesn't mean they won't be able to execute on it- matter of fact, with a team the size of myspace's, they'll likely do execute, and execute it well.

You mentioned that the video clearly used test data, but seemed to forget that when mentioning the affinity feature.

Maybe they sync people's instagram photos on their myspace profile.

Point being, give Myspace a fair change. They're certainly not the new kid on the block, are experienced, and this seems like a good new effort.

I loved the lyrics to the song:

    Maybe I'm ashamed to want you back
    Maybe I'm afraid you'll never stay
    Thought I hated you a long long time
    There was my mistake

Those were my thoughts exactly.

I loved that too. There's a good sense of humour there which was lacking from the last "My______" redesign/rebrand.

> (I make this observation based on the fact that every post had "12 Connects", "3 Comments" and "2 Shares". Surely if you put this much effort into production of a video you would change these numbers?)

I don't think it says that all. The last thing I do when designing a page is hook it up to a data source.

Nothing in this video looks that difficult to implement. Difficult to make cross-browser compatible, most likely.

"But, I just fail to see how they are going to get a strong user base"

Why not some integration with Pandora, where you can create user specific radio stations based off of the band's Myspace profile, that is also linked to their tour schedule etc etc?

Then all Pandora users who have a station created from that band can be notified either though a push notification or e-mail when they are playing a club within a 30 mi radius?

Integrating with the current Pandora userbase would fix the "how will they build a userbase?" and then Pandora would have another venue to access unsigned bands that they can promote through their Music Genome Project.

Just a thought off the top of my head.

The use of horizontal scroll in the video is probably some way from fully refined too - there was no obvious chrome to facilitate the panning, which doesn't often work well outside of touch devices.

> just considering most/all bands are content and happy with Facebook and integration with the vast supply of Band Related apps...

I don't know whether to call this a gross generalization or plain wrong, but it's both.

Not staged, the demo user was logged in as Justin for the last half of the video

Definitely staged, otherwise please explain to me how "Justin" adds a link without using his mouse at 02:03.