Hacking MySpace

This week Myspace have released a number of new updates for Myspace music and have told us about some “coming soon” features too.

In this post I will go through the new updates and mention the “coming soon” updates too - expressing my opinion as always along the way.

The Updates

Brand New Music Player

Available for both Artist profiles and normal profiles there is a brand new music player. The player looks different than the old one (but has the same features and more), Myspace have also said that you will be able to customize the look of your music player in the near future (probably April) - so watch out for that! The customizing will be great because at the moment it doesn’t look like it would “fit” with many layouts on Myspace (including the Myspace themes). This player allows you to create playlists (with a maximum of 10 songs on each playlist) that you can send to your friends and choose one to put on your profile. The player also allows you to randomize what song plays first when someone views your page (so it’s not always the same) which is a pretty nice little addition they have on it (although I think it should have been on the old one - I can’t imagine its a hard thing to do).

As for artists, this player allows artists to upload albums and then choose what songs of theirs to feature on the main player. The “times played” has disappeared from the player and can now be seen only by clicking on the statistics button at the bottom of the player. I think that the statistics pages are just a pointless addition, it’d be easier if the times played were just displayed on the player. Myspace have said that this is because they intend to show a lot more stats in the near future which needed a new page to display them - so watch out for that.

More Music!

Myspace keep adding hundreds (sometimes thousands) of songs every day for a lot of mainstream artists (so if you don’t see the song you want one day then it might be there the next - just keep checking back), and the best thing is that it’s all legal! This means that Myspace are paying royalties to the artists for having the music up there on their site (which is great for the music community).

Updated search

Myspace have made the music search much better. You can now search on a whole range of fields - artist, album, song, etc. and you can play a song straight from the search page (which might annoy some artists who are wanting people visiting their page to hear their songs). You can also drag songs from the search into your playlists (which is a great addition I think).

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