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MySpace Music Gets New Leadership to Match New Direction

Posted: 25 Nov 2008 05:43 PM PST

-Courtney Holt Picture-

MySpace Music just “officially” launched earlier this year in September, and it has unsurprisingly become an integral part in MySpace’s overall product map moving forward. To help steer that product map in the right direction is Courtney Holt, the newly appointed President of MySpace Music.

As a former Executive Vice President of Digital Music for the MTV Networks Music and Logo Group, Holt has worked with the music and the web-based aspects of both industries. Specifically, Holt has worked on several initiatives for engaging audiences online and offline–something he’ll likely bring to his new position as the MySpace Music President.

Prior to working at MTV Networks, Holt was the Senior Vice President of New Media, Creative and Strategic Marketing at Interscope, where he also had the opportunity of working with MySpace on a number of projects for artists such as Weezer and Black Eyed Peas.

It’s pretty clear that Holt has an affinity for technology-based solutions regarding music marketing and branding practices, and with MySpace Music having just launched as a highly integrated project for combining aspects of the traditional music industry with online social networking. Holt will begin his position as the President of MySpace Music on January 5, 2009.

MySpace Begins Giving Developers Access to the News Feed

Posted: 25 Nov 2008 01:17 PM PST

-MySpace Logo- If MySpace could help developers promote their applications to get more distribution, activity notifications in friends’ news feeds would be a great way to do it. Last night the company announced that they are rolling out the beta version of “application activities”. Currently these application activities will only be viewable to developers until at least “after the holidays”.

Once fully rolled out this will give developers on the MySpace platform, much greater promotional visibility. This is excellent news for developers but as Chris, a social application developer states in the MySpace forum, “I want to have my activities code ready to go the instant this goes live on the main site, but also I have a lot of urgent work to get done on other platforms which have much higher traffic.”

That response is similar to the response many other developers have personally told me. As the social application space becomes spread across limitless platforms, it becomes essential to prioritize and focus development activities on those platforms providing the greatest return. Right now the platform which provides the most growth opportunity remains to be Facebook.

Not only does Facebook already provide a number of viral distribution channels but the company also remains to be the fastest growing social network in terms of absolute members. This has made it a challenging environment for other social platforms despite OpenSocial’s much larger reach. It’s clear that MySpace isn’t slowing down though despite the challenging environment.

Today’s news of a new distribution channel for developers is one sign of MySpace’s continued effort to attract developer attention.