Myspace: The Rise, Reign, and Fall of a Legendary Service

Before algorithms determined what we could see or liked, there was Myspace. It wasn’t just a website… it was where we once lived. It was where we got to show the world who we were. It made celebrities, it made families, and it became a huge part of our internet history.  

A Digital Bedroom

In 2003, Myspace showed up when the internet was at its most experimental. It wasn’t asking for you to be clean and polished. It only wanted to ask who you were…

Co-founder Tom Anderson's profile.

Your profile was a digital bedroom. Your choice of music would autoplay for any visitors, having them associate you with it. Your background was your mood; whether you kept the same one for days, months, or even years. The glittery text, the blurry photos, the dramatic quotes, and raw HTML... It wasn’t just a profile, it was art. Nothing matched, nothing loaded correctly. Yet somehow for us it was a perfect phase of the internet.

Unlike the uniformity we see today on social media, Myspace encouraged your creativity almost to an absurd degree. Think maximalism!!!

You were able to edit your profile with photos, GIFs, unreadable fonts, embed videos, and even playlists. Sometimes it looked messy, sometimes it was slow, but it was yours. Some people who had never even considered coding only learned because they wanted a better background than their friends 🤣.

HTML as Self-Expression

A pink profile of a Myspace user.

One of Myspace’s most radical features wasn’t just social; it was technical.

You had the ability to edit your profile with HTML. Not through a template or a dropdown menu, it was just raw code that created limitless possibilities. You could edit fonts, layouts, add scrolling marquees, embed music players and videos, layer GIFs, and so much more!! It was chaotic (and slightly unsafe), but empowering.

With that control back then, I had to make sure to follow any profile that caught my eye so I could learn what was possible, otherwise it would be lost to the insane void of profiles where everyone wanted to one up each other's personalities.

Musical Stardom

Myspace Music home page.

Before viral marketing teams and paid promotions were commonplace, Myspace allowed fame to happen organically. With music features being a prominent characteristic, it opened the door for many artists to come out into the light.

Artists like Adele, Calvin Harris, and Lily Allen would upload their tracks directly to their profiles to interact with fans without a label in between. Plays weren’t just an abstract metric; they were visible proof of you being heard. For these artists, it was a launchpad of unlimited potential. 

The 2019 Data Loss

Myspace music archive

In March 2019, Myspace admitted that everything uploaded between 2003 and 2015 was gone. Roughly 50 million songs from 14 million artists, wiped out in what they called a failed server migration. Their apology was four sentences long. I still find that baffling to this day...

It only came after a year of users pointing out how many songs they wanted to listen to were essentially just "dead links". Impossible to open.

What vanished were the demos, the bedroom recordings, the bands that played four shows and broke up... All music that existed in exactly one place.

There is good news, though. A group had scraped 1.3 terabytes off the site for research years earlier, and handed it to the Internet Archive. It's up there now as the Myspace Dragon Hoard, containing about 490,000 songs. Roughly 1% of what was lost.

Check it out here!

Never Forgotten

The original homepage of Myspace back in the day.

We don’t miss Myspace because it was perfect (it wasn’t, believe me). We miss it because it was honest and really captured a moment in the internet where things felt smaller. When experimentation was encouraged and users could shape their space instead of being shaped by it.

Myspace also had a bulletin where others could connect about similar interests. They also had blogs which helped create more influencers on top of that, leading to one of the few beginnings of blog culture. It was easy to create discussions for anything that was happening at the time, as well as seeking out new friends to increase your friends list count (people used to compete to see who could have the most friends).

In a world full of curated feeds and invisible metrics, Myspace takes us back to when your page didn’t just have to be aesthetically pleasing. It just had to be about you as a whole. Maybe that’s why it still lingers in the back of your mind like that song that auto played when you opened your profile...

 

Myspace Today

Myspace sparkly gif

Myspace in present time is unrecognizable from everything we had just previously covered... It's stripped of all familiarity that we grew up with and ultimately the platform that helped kickstart a massive push for the normalization of social media in our everyday lives. The site now serves more as a networking platform like LinkedIn for artists. Though personally, we can't find any good reason for anyone to use it nowadays with more reliable ways for promotion honestly...

Facebook took the throne that rightfully belonged to Myspace. That's an unfortunate truth that shaped social media forever for better or for worse.

There are two things that recently came to light however!

Myspace might not be done yet...

Current owners, Chris and Tim Vanderhook.

A documentary in 2026 about Myspace has the site's current owners saying they're not finished with it. "We still own Myspace... and we are going to relaunch Myspace," says Chris Vanderhook, who bought the platform with his brother Tim in 2011. "We're just waiting for the right time to do it."

Co-founder Chris DeWolfe also appeared in the doc and made a case for why it could land. He describes the old profiles almost like decorating a room, with your music playing and your Top 8 on display, and the "serendipity" of finding new bands through strangers' pages. Back then, he says, "it wasn't a machine telling you to visit someone's profile." Now everything is "fed to you based on algorithms."

The future is to be seen if a successful relaunch of Myspace becomes reality... if an attempt at relaunching one even happens.

Meet SpaceHey!

SpaceHey layouts page.

Anton Röhm, an 18 year old German web developer who had never used Myspace, took matters into his own hands after coming to his own conclusion that the classic Myspace experience is genuinely impossible to find today. I am sure many of you reading this now weren't old enough to use the platform (one way of calling me old, thanks) when it was at its most popular, but he set his mind to correct that problem.

It's 2020 and SpaceHey launches to the public, reaching over 100,000 users by the beginning of the following year. And as of March 2026, it's passed 2 million users!

It's an almost perfect homage to everything we had just discussed in this post. Everything is here. Blogs, Bulletins, Profile HTML and CSS customization!!

The immediate introduction of meeting new people and interacting with anyone in every corner and a music focused side of the site that is in active development. It's in all aspects a genuine love letter to the past like we have never seen done before!