CEO Mike Jones talks about the social service's comeback.
Is MySpace in a 'death spiral', as moderator Robert Scoble put it on-stage at LeWeb this morning? He was sitting next to the right man to ask: new MySpace CEO Mike Jones.
"We have 130 million monthly active users today, so we still have this substantial user base," said Jones, while flagging up MySpace's recent relaunch as a social entertainment service.
"This is not a single-platform game: we want to be the best in the social entertainment experience," he said, suggesting that in the next year, more people will use MySpace to connect themselves to their favourite bands, TV shows, celebrities and entertainment.
Jones was asked about the menacing noises coming from execs at MySpace's parent company News Corporation about possibly selling its social arm off.
"I believe News Corp is going to give us the time and leverage that we need to make this thing," said Jones.
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He moved on to the philosophy behind MySpace's relaunch, and its decision to work with Facebook, tapping into its social graph. "The web and mobile will become social," said Jones. "We wanna be the best at connecting the content."
Jones said that it's early days for the new product, and promised that MySpace will be working with more social platforms in the coming months.
Jones was also bullish about mobile platforms. "Today a third of MySpace's daily audience interact with MySpace via mobiles," he said.
"We're creating a mobile application network. We have four or five micro-applications released on the iPhone, we have a music videos application on iPad, and we have Android... They're all specifically focused on entertainment."
MySpace will next week launch its new iPhone app, which will not require users to log in, but which will dig into their music library to serve up a feed of activity from the bands whose songs they own.
Jones also talked about MySpace's goal of delivering video to MySpace users within the site, no matter what the source. "YouTube in this case becomes a partner for us," he says.
Jones was asked about how MySpace plans to stop artists from leaving MySpace.
"My goal is you come to MySpace, you listen to some new bands, connect to those bands... I don't wanna be the place that replaces iTunes. I wanna be the place where you learn about music and then take that to wherever your music consumption happens."
Jones was asked if MySpace plans to acquire any smaller developers - interviewer Scoble cited the example of music discovery app Aweditorium as a potentially good fit.
"Mobile is one of the more interesting spaces for us," said Jones. "We're certainly aware of what those guys are doing."
Back to the MySpace website, which relaunched 15 days ago. Jones was asked if he has any indicators of its success, and said that there is evidence that lapsing users are re-engaging with the service.
"If we connect you to curators who bring you the best content... your repeat visits go dramatically up," he said, as one example.
"We do need to get better at surfacing music that interests you," he said, pointing out that this isn't just about big bands trending like the Black Eyed Peas, but also bands "gaining velocity" at smaller levels - getting back to MySpace's indie roots.
The new iPhone app will play its part in that, alongside the curator-connections and recommendations on the main site.
However, the future for MySpace Music - the company's streaming music service - looks decidedly dodgy, with Jones saying he does not expect MySpace to become the "de factor" music consumption platform for its users.
