Introducing: Main Accounts: The Story of MySpace

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
My Space was the first major social media company. At
that time in my life, I was like getting bullied
really bad, and then on my Space people like loved
how I look looked up to me, like loved my style.
It was a trip, and it was the first major
social media company to collapse. The story of my Space
was about a bunch of people who were really not

(00:23):
that good at what they did, but we're successful. My
name is Joanne McNeil. I'm a writer who covered internet
culture since the early days of social media. Of all
the companies I've written about, my Space is the most compelling.
On my new podcast, Main Accounts the Story of my Space,

(00:44):
I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the
people who lived it. The users just went from like
zero sixty on, like I'm in ninth grade and I'm
posting pictures from my friencing tournament to taking all of
my regular friends off just adding like hundreds of kids
with like dark emo bangs and an eyeliner just every

(01:06):
day like hundreds of strangers. The social network often felt
like a house party thrown when someone's parents were out
of town. But life on my Space could be messy
and chaotic. Now we have this concept of online safety.
There wasn't that in the two thousands, and sometimes unspeakably tragic.

(01:27):
Probably twenty minutes later, I just had a horrible feeling
that ran through my entire body. I stopped in mid
sentence and ran up to a room. At the height
of its popularity, a quarter million users were signing up
for new accounts every day. We were all figuring out
how to live online together in real time. They made

(01:52):
the Internet, which up until then had been kind of
like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub, like I
feel like a cool place and also slightly dame chers
It's a wild West, you know. Way before bizdev deals
for partnerships were coming along, things were just happening. What
was this social media sensation? Who is MySpace? Tom? Why
did news Court make a play for the social network?

(02:15):
Rupert Murnock lost lots and lots of money on MySpace
because it turned out it was actually not a good business.
Why aren't people using MySpace now? I remember one day
realizing that I had only been using Facebook for weeks
and weeks and hadn't checked my MySpace at all. We'll
explore all that and more, because what happened in the

(02:38):
MySpace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms
to follow. If the beginning of Tila Tequila being on
my radar as this MySpace influencer for being a queer
woman of color, if that was like the promise of
the Internet. The day that I saw that image of
her doing a Nazi salute with a bunch of all
right dirtbags, that was the nail in the coffin. And

(03:00):
so I feel like that moment for me really crystallized
where we started and unfortunately, where we wound up. Listen
to main accounts the story of MySpace starting March fifteenth
on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
find your favorite shows