MySpace Introduces New Profiles for Users, Musicians, and Celebrities

We’ve received a lot of feedback that our users were having a tough time navigating across MySpace profiles and discovering cool content easily. So today, we’re cleaning things up a bit and we’re thrilled to announce the launch of the newly designed MySpace profile and theme gallery.

Featuring dozens of unique designs by talented artists, the new user profiles deliver clean and easy-to-use navigation and simplified organization of content, including a consistent theme throughout profile subpages (photos, playlists, videos and more). Better design tools accompany the new layout, giving users the opportunity to create a truly customized look for their individual profile.

With the new themes and theme gallery, MySpace is providing newer and fresher artistic and contemporary themes. We collaborated with top artists and graphic designers such as Studio Number One (founded by Shepard Fairey), Justin Harder and Buff Monster. We plan to bring more than 40 creative themes to the MySpace community and you can expect much more to come.

For musicians, the new look and feel will improve the artist to fan interaction on MySpace. The new profile is designed to enhance, yet simplify the experience for friends and fans visiting their profile. We’ve brought more simplicity and consistency to the navigation, making it easier and more appealing than ever for fans to find artist’s music, photos, videos, tour dates and more. The new profiles also allow musicians to upload more songs, feature up to 25 songs on their profile, choose from the dozens of new themes in our theme gallery and create their own custom marquee header.

We’re amazed with the response so far:

· Close to 4 million users including celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Nicole Kidman, Russell Brand, Cristiano Ronaldo and Eli Roth have upgraded to the new profiles during our beta phase

· Musicians have also started to convert to the new profiles including Lady Antebellum, Brandon Flowers, Silversun Pickups, Outkast, Thirty Seconds to Mars, The Decemberists, Colbie Caillat and more.

· Non-profits like Stand Up 2 Cancer and UNIFEM are also taking advantage of the new profiles to more closely engage advocates

In keeping with our mission to highlight talent, future iterations will allow users to submit their digital art for the theme gallery. This new take on self-expression through design will incorporate a new robust theme machine, enhancing the ability for partners and users to create specialized profile designs for musicians, celebrities, brands and anyone else who wants a unique design. Additionally, we are working with design firms to build tools that allow third party sites to display and promote themes, and support the ability to designate a theme for one or more profiles without submitting it to the theme gallery.

Both the gallery and theme machine will serve as part of a profile design ecosystem that will support submission, rating and conversations around themes. We’re dedicated to equipping users with easy-to-use tools to create, customize and manage their digital persona and look forward to sharing more in the coming weeks that will further improve the discovery experience.

One of the foundational features of MySpace is the ability to express your passions, who you are or who you want to be. These new features strike the right balance between maintaining a structured, easy to use site and offering the sense of creative freedom that fueled MySpace’s popularity at inception.

Be sure to upgrade your own profile. For more information on the new profile for artists, visit our new blog for musicians on MySpace called ArtistHQ.

As always, let us know what you think.

-Ali