The shops are full of low-rise jeans and ballet pumps. My Chemical Romance have just done a stadium tour. And as if we needed any further evidence that 2026 is the new 2006, MySpace might be making a comeback.
Of course, every millennial's favourite website never really went away. It simply faded into obscurity, along with the majority of the emo bands that you discovered there, superseded by Facebook and then by all the other platforms that sprung up in its wake. But now its current owners, Chris and Tim Vanderhook, have claimed that they are "going to relaunch MySpace", the mid-Noughties social media giant that, for better or worse, allowed a generation of teenagers to start thinking about how they might be perceived on the internet – they're "just waiting for the right time to do it".
As yet, the specifics of their vision remain just vague enough to pique the interest of a whole load of nostalgic thirty- and forty-somethings. The Vanderhooks are reportedly keen for their overhauled version of MySpace to present an alternative to algorithm-driven feeds, influencer culture and the infinite scroll.
Whether that's simply wishful thinking remains to be seen, but there's certainly an appetite for social media that feels a bit more social and a bit less samey. There are only so many times you can see thousands upon thousands of influencers posting variations on what they believe to be "kinda chic", after all. MySpace's heyday remains as a high water mark for online creativity, a time when individuality and personality flourished without being flattened into microtrends and viral moments.
The MySpace story began all the way back in the Nineties. While studying for his MBA in California, Chris DeWolfe had come up with a social media platform prototype that he'd called Sitegeist. Later, when he was working with the online marketing company eUniverse, he noted that Friendster, one of the earliest social media sites, was becoming more and more popular.
A network teeming with users willing to hand over their details promised a whole load of possibilities for ad distribution (isn't that always the motivation behind every other big internet idea?) DeWolfe started dusting off his old blueprint with colleagues Tom Anderson and Josh Berman, digging out a domain name, myspace.com, that he'd bought a few years earlier.
By the summer of 2006, MySpace was the most visited site in the US (AFP/Getty)
The site launched in August 2003. Email databases from its parent company helped cast a wide net when it came to enticing new users. And whenever anyone signed up, they would always start off with one friend on their list – Anderson, the site's president, who became known as "Tom from MySpace". His avatar, a headshot showing him posing in front of a whiteboard covered in what looked like startup-speak scribbles, would soon become part of the fabric of the early internet memories of a generation of millennials.
Just under three years later, in June 2006, MySpace would become the most visited site in the United States. In the same month, one million people signed up for the UK launch. I was one of them. Within a year or so, the UK spin-off alone hit 10 million users.
Why was it so popular? For many of us, it was the first time that we'd considered how we might appear to others online. And it was so customisable and fun! It just felt like the perfect place to express yourself and show up to meet people you had things in common with.
You could tweak almost every aspect of your profile, from the background to the font to the exact shade of glitter that might cascade from the top of the screen as you scrolled. You just needed to play around with HTML, or hyper text mark-up language; without realising it, we were learning basic scraps of code.
Another pal spent hours fiddling around with HTML tags in order to make her profile look like an iTunes music library. Appropriate enough, really, because MySpace had a major influence on the artists we'd upload to our chunky iPods. From the start, MySpace's founders decided to encourage bands and promoters to join their platform as a way of getting their music out to the masses, and aspiring musicians would use it to upload their demos.
Co-founder Tom Anderson was every user's first 'friend' (Getty)
Discovering a new favourite artist was a real rush. Rather than floating passively on the tide of the Spotify algorithm, I'd search for the profiles of the bands I'd read about in the NME, listen to the tracks on their music player and decide whether their CDs would be worth a punt.
My love of Arctic Monkeys began on MySpace with their Beneath the Boardwalk demo. Adele and Lily Allen got their start on the platform, too. One of MySpace's most alluring features (to a performative teenager desperate to broadcast their taste, at least) was the way it allowed you to attach one song to your profile, which would then autoplay to any digital visitors. The more esoteric, the better.
