The announcement of the New MySpace yesterday went viral almost immediately, fuelled mainly by criticism from TechCrunch and retweets from many of Justin Timberlake’s 13.8 million followers on Twitter.

For the last 2 years, usage of the platform has been in steady decline. Facebook has taken over, and music discovery has moved to platforms like Spotify, VEVO, last.fm and Soundcloud. Those four platforms alone get 62% of the UK Internet traffic to music sites.

The MySpace platform has found its strength in focusing on music, and their usage has plateaued over the last 9 months, but they’ve been easily eclipsed by the likes of Spotify and VEVO. Spotify’s social integration and compelling offering has helped make them the second highest source of revenue for major music labels. VEVO, operated by the major labels themselves, hosts a selection of 50,000 videos and a heavily monetised offering.

So will the ‘New MySpace’ be successful enough to bring it back to where it once was? Justin will certainly find a challenge in competing with Spotify, especially with regard to monetisation. It remains to be seen how soon they will deliver the platform they’ve previewed to us, and if it will deliver on expectations, but will people even try it?

If the buzz is anything to go by, yes they will. TechCrunch’s negative article resulted in a barrage of comments accusing the author of being too biased and debating the value of design and content. More than that, Twitter was chock full of tweets from people who were delighted by the video preview published at new.myspace.com, to the point where you’d struggle to find negative opinions.

It certainly is sexy, and we’ll all be watching with interest to see if they can really pull this off.