Before Elon Musk’s X-formerly-known-as-Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta-formerly-known-as-Facebook, there was MySpace, a Y2K relic of a moment in time when writing anything in italics required you to use BBCode (“Chemical Romance is my [i]life[/i]”) and anyone who knew what the word “algorithm” meant was more likely to get shoved in a locker than a C-suite.
If you’re nostalgic for a cultural moment in which tech founders were more interested in cultivating artistic talent than manipulating data-stealing algorithms (who among us), so is director Tommy Avallone, the auteur behind the masterpiece that is The Bill Murray Stories. Twenty years since MySpace’s founding, Avallone just announced an upcoming feature doc about its creators, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe, along with the music stars whose careers were effectively launched by the platform – think Lily Allen, the Arctic Monkeys and Katy Perry.
It’s easy to forget in the TikTok age that, in 2006, MySpace was the third most-visited website in the world (just assume the top spots were Google and low-budget porn, although not necessarily in that order.) The site still exists, of course, under the auspices of Viant Technology’s Tim and Chris Vanderhook, having previously been purchased by Justin Timberlake following his turn in 2010’s The Social Network – a move I can only assume was an attempt at retrospective method acting. For what it’s worth, if NSYNC does move forward with a reunion tour, announcing it on MySpace would be a fittingly nostalgic flex.
Of course, it’s possible that the MySpace documentary will address some of the more ridiculous moments in the platform’s history – see the aforementioned Timberlake takeover, and the fact that it “lost” approximately 50 million songs due to a server error in 2019. More intriguing, though, will be the Web 1.0 nostalgia it will inevitably trigger. Please spare me the “I’m old” DMs, but do keep the links to your now defunct teen LiveJournals coming.
