Mark Cuban's advice to Myspace

I made what turned out to be a rather lengthy comment on the latest post at blogmaverick.com wherein Mark Cuban gives advice to Rupert Murdoch. A quick survey of my readers (hey me!) indicated that close to 100% would like to have that insightful comment right here on their favorite blog. Hence this post.

The first part of Cuban's advice is kind of crazy. He wants news sites to block incoming links from aggregators. Block links! That's a surprising level of cluelessness from our good friend, who is getting all the flack he deserves for that idea from other people so I won't add to it.

The more interesting part of the post is on Myspace's potential future business model... I really think he's on to something. Here's what I had to say about it (Since Wave is not integrated with Blogger yet, I can only cut & paste):

Excellent advice for Myspace, Mark! I think being a music platform is the best business plan for them. They have the audience with the right demographics, and the artists. For now… But they can’t pull it off with the website they have today. So the big question is, do they have the technical capability to support that business plan?

It would take a significant breakthrough, a next generation web application. It would have streaming, download and playback, syncing with devices, all better or at least as good as todays iTunes client/server combo. It would also have to be a great authoring/publication tool for artists to easily create a good looking online presence, perhaps even some actual post-production music features to create special samples and mixes…

In short, they need a site that is as different from today’s Myspace pages as, let’s say, Gmail in 2009 is different from Hotmail of 1999. The ingredients are available and ripe: after years of stagnation, browsers and web languages are in a period of intense innovation. But can Myspace pull them together to create a cool and, as Steve Jobs would say, “insanely great” technology for the new web-based music universe? I doubt it. I just don’t see any evidence whatsoever, at Myspace or anywhere else at News corp, of the level of technical depth required to lead the world into this new — dare I say it? — “web 3.0″ music world. Still, you are right IMHO, it’s their best bet and they should at least try rather than wither away.