Ah, MySpace. It’s hard to believe that it was only five or six years ago when it was one of the most essential sites on the internet, a place to hear new bands and see some of the most headache-inducing layouts since the days of Geocities. With the news that Fleet Foxes are imploring MySpace to delete their page (they can’t log in and do it themselves, apparently), we got thinking about the early days of the site, when people were actually excited to join it, rather than desperate to get away from it. We had a look at the Wayback Machine and collected a few band sites from the early, innocent days of MySpace –- the good, the bad and the (very) ugly.
The Kills, March 2005
“The Kills has 274 friends.” Bless!
Lily Allen, April 2006
If any one artist is forever associated with MySpace, it’s Lily Allen –- the ill-advised blogs, the “discovered on MySpace” hype, the similarly transitory nature of her career. In true MySpace style, that background blinks and changes color, too.
Panic at the Disco, February 2005
Another band forever associated with MySpace. Back in 2005, they were still looking for a stable line-up, as the polite little notice on the bottom right of this page suggests: “We are looking to get a full-time keyboard player for sequencing/synth. Contact us.”
Tila Tequila, July 2004
Sadly, the Wayback Machine hasn’t preserved whatever God-awful background doubtless accompanied this page, but even so, the layout is enough to make us wince. There’s so much text that it didn’t fit on our screen (always make sure your page is viewable on smaller screen sizes, kids), and it appears to contain Tila’s entire life story in one long unexpurgated rant, punctuated by lots of exclamation marks. Apparently, some things never change.
Lady Sovereign, April 2006
Now this is a MySpace layout. We particularly like how the background makes the menu text at the top of the page completely unreadable. Bravo.