The long-dormant social network that once helped launch careers for artists including Arctic Monkeys, Adele and Katy Perry is getting another shot at a comeback.
In the new documentary Myspace, directed by Tommy Avallone, current owners Chris and Tim Vanderhook said they still control the platform and intend to revive it. “We still own Myspace. We are stewards of the Myspace brand at this point, and we are going to relaunch Myspace,” Tim Vanderhook stated in the film. “We’re just waiting for the right time to do it. And if that one doesn’t work, we’ll do it again.”
No timeline, design details or feature list has been revealed. The comments mark the clearest public signal yet that the Vanderhooks remain committed to the brand more than a decade after their initial attempt to revive it.
Myspace launched in 2003 and quickly became a central hub for music discovery. Users built highly customized profiles complete with HTML edits, ranked friends in the signature Top 8, and set profile songs that often introduced emerging artists to wider audiences. News Corp acquired the company for roughly $580 million in 2005. By the late 2000s the site had lost significant ground to Facebook and was sold in 2011 for about $35 million to Specific Media, the firm founded by the Vanderhook brothers, with Justin Timberlake taking a stake.
The new owners poured resources into a music-focused redesign, hoping to restore what they described as the platform’s original “artist community.” That effort fell short. Advertisers shifted elsewhere, and the brothers later acknowledged losing more than $150 million. “We lost a little over $150 million,” Chris Vanderhook said in the documentary. Tim added that the money was “incinerated.”
The company later operated under Viant Technology. After corporate ownership changes that included a period under Time Inc., control of Myspace returned to the Vanderhooks. The site never fully closed, though a 2019 server migration erased large amounts of older user data and music uploads. Since 2024 it has operated primarily in read-only mode.
Avallone’s documentary, which premiered at Toronto’s Hot Docs Festival in spring 2026, traces the platform’s rise, its cultural influence on a generation of users and artists, and the challenges that followed. As of early August it had not yet secured a major streaming release.
Whether a new version of Myspace can find an audience in an era dominated by algorithm-driven feeds remains an open question. The Vanderhooks have offered no specifics on how the relaunch might emphasize music, customization or community features that once defined the site. Original co-founder Tom Anderson, known to millions as “Myspace Tom,” is not involved in the current plans.
For now, the owners say they are simply waiting for the right moment — and are prepared to try again if the next attempt does not succeed.
