MySpace redesign should compete with YouTube, not Pinterest or Tumblr

MySpace isn’t going quietly into the night. The most popular social network of the early-to-mid 2000s, now down a few million users and newly commandeered by Justin Timberlake and a company called Specific Media, dropped a video preview of its eye-catching redesign on Monday, causing people to actually talk about MySpace again (though notably on MySpace’s usurpers Facebook and Twitter).

The redesign – which eschews MySpace’s older standardized “headshot” profile layout as well as its later funkier redesigns – was immediately compared to numerous other sites and products of the moment; Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, even Windows 8 and Google Plus.

While some of these comparisons are more accurate than others from a design standpoint (Tumblr and Pinterest, namely), the truth is, all that matters in the new video is that it showed MySpace’s renewed focus on being a platform for music discovery, a move that the site first truly embraced in 2005 soon after its acquisition by News Corp.

Going after music listeners or music video watchers isn’t a bad strategy, either, given MySpace’s built-in associations with the medium online, but if that’s the way MySpace wants to play it, it should be aiming to compete more with YouTube, which Nielsen recently found was the preferred free music video service of the youngs.

As WSJ summarized the findings:

Nearly two-thirds of U.S. teenagers under the age of 18 say they use Google Inc.‘s video-sharing site to listen to music, more than any other medium, according to a new consumer survey from Nielsen Co., one of many challenges facing record companies as they transition into the digital world.

So yeah, MySpace 2.0 (or 12.0, whatever it’s on now) can make all the moves it wants to ape Pinterest and the rest of the new social Web, but YouTube is really the music social network to beat moving forward.

Based on tweet exchange w/ Kathrina Manalac