All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go: MySpace to be Sold?

MySpace’s recent redesign and relaunch had a modicum of positive press moving for the site in the first time in a long while, though after yesterday’s News Corp. earnings call, it seems that it might be more short-lived than most expected.  As MediaMemo reports, the clear message from the COO of MySpace parent company News Corp. was that traffic is still not going in the right direction, and when asked how long the site would be given to improve following the relaunch, he remarked that they “judge in quarters, not in years” – not a good sign for the social network, which Rupert Murdoch’s media empire acquired in 2005. Does this signal that a sale is imminent – for real this time? Rumblings of investment groups putting together blueprints for an acquisition of the site continue to get louder, and it’s becoming more apparent that News Corp. desires to get the site off its books. But what would new owners of MySpace do with the site? While the new look and feel of the site is an obvious improvement, the company’s expressed focus on turning the social network into an entertainment hub seems ill-advised at best. A recent critique of the site relaunch on Evolver.fm puts it best, Myspace should leverage the one thing it has that no one else does: all of that independent music, free for the sampling, which the bands put there themselves. Stay tuned…