Last month, Myspace CEO Owen Van Natta stepped down as CEO of the company just after nine months of being in the position. Many are speculating this could be the beginning of the end for the service, although it is still one of the most heavily visited sites on the Internet.

In the web 2.0 world, Myspace pretty much started it all as the first major social network. But in the year 2010, the system is still horribly clunky and unstable. The site is simply more of chore to keep around than anything else.

Facebook to rule them all?

At some point, there was hope that Facebook’s Pages system would be the nail in the coffin, but it seems like an ineffective way to find new fans. Facebook has one mighty power to rule them all though – that is the ability for event promoters to spam the heck out of people with invitations free of any limits.

What about that time, at bandcamp?

I have been using Bandcamp and Soundcloud for the past year or so, and while they are great services, they don’t pose much of a threat to the Myspace empire. Soundcloud has some social features like a newsfeed and commenting inside its beautiful Flash player, but its business model is based on charging users for extra storage, making it more of a hosting service more than anything else. On the plus side it is free of those annoying ads found on Myspace.

Bandcamp does not charge at the moment, but also functions similar to hosting/e-commerce platform. It recently unveiled a tagging system to help people discover similar artists to yours, but overall music discovery is not the goal of the site.

Moving forward…

So what’s next? the thing that Myspace did so well from a users point of view is it gave us instant access to the songs an artist was featuring at any point in time. The only problem is it was painful to update those songs, and the updates feed is buried in the backend.

I think that if a site comes along which combines the sleek uploading process of Bandcamp, with the existing networks of fans found in Twitter or Facebook, it could be a good candidate to replace Myspace. I’m thinking about something like Flavors.me for music.

Maybe Myspace will never need to be replaced, since it serves a function in the music world and people are used to its downsides.

What do you think is going to happen? Will Myspace manage to keep its place in the sun?

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Mr. Tunes is busy this year with his Daily Creations project.
Download his new release Nagano Car Rental.