Exclusive: Sean Percival Joins MySpace, Talks to SiliconANGLE About MySpace’s Strategy
Yesterday evening, MySpace announced that my friend and SiliconANGLE contributor Sean Percival is now the Director of Content Socialization at the company. Sean’s worked a number of places you’ve heard of, and runs Lalawag with his wife Laurie.
Sean and I talked briefly last month as a part of the SiliconANGLE predictions series.
The meat of the conversation around his work and thoughts about MySpace start at around timestamp 2:30, though the whole interview from start to finish was one of the more interesting talks I conducted during the predictions series. I asked Sean on his thoughts on MySpace’s strategy going forward – not just his advice for the company, but the sense of what the company was trying to do: were they trying to be a music site again, or were they trying to compete head on with Facebook.
The answer I got from Sean seemed to indicate that while they were still in the business of “socializing everything,” they’ve continued to be the “number one music site, across the board.”
He said also that you can expect to see all the advanced features currently reserved for musician profiles “start to trickle down to ‘standard profiles’ as well. The musicians community on MySpace will get new and experimental features first and then it’ll be implemented more widely.” We didn’t dwell too deeply on the MySpace topic since we were there to talk about something else entirely, but it was too interesting not to delve into, and given his new role a few weeks later, his insights carry a new significance.
Obviously we don’t see the same relevance in MySpace in the tech and social media fishbowl that we see in tools we like such as Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook. MySpace has, as Sean says, turned into the premiere site on the web for music, and musicians are their “early adopter community,” just as Facebook now has Friendfeed as it’s sort of early adopter community to test things with.
Looked at through that lens, it does give MySpace a bit more relevance and identity. Conveying that to the rest of us snooty social media pundits will likely be a component of bringing Sean to the team in a visible role.
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