I Told You MySpace Should Focus On Music

According to recent Nielsen data for June 2009, traffic to MySpace Music has grown 190% since its launch in September 2008 and year-over-year traffic to the URL has increased a whopping 1,017%.  Additionally, MySpace Music the third largest music destination on the web (within that category of sites) only behind AOL Music and Yahoo! Music.  While MySpace Music is still behind AOL and Yahoo! it is beating out other popular music oriented sites like MTV, MSN Music, and Pandora.

The majority of the traffic is coming from the age groups 12-17 and 18-24.  Visitors between the ages 12 and 17 were 2.4 times more likely than the average active Internet user to visit MySpace Music, while visitors between 18 and 24 were 2.2 more likely than the average Internet user to visit the site in June.  (See charts after the jump)

It was only last month when I wrote that MySpace was floundering and needed to refocus themselves.  I suggested that they focus on music which is what the site originally was meant to do – promote music for bands.  If these numbers don’t make MySpace’s new CEO Owen Van Natta consider that music is what actually makes this site tick then MySpace is in for even more bad news.  It’s hard to deny that music is the key to MySpace’s success – the numbers don’t lie.

MySpace needs to work with artists to gain exclusive releases from artists and work to become the premier place for artists to want to release their music to first.  Whether it be an exclusive single or album (even if it’s just for a select period of time) that’s what MySpace needs to do to get to the top of the music industry.