Final Rating: 4/5
Early in the documentary Myspace, directed by Tommy Avallone, one of the most interesting questions gets posed to some of the subjects being interviewed about the rise and fall of the pioneering social media site. When did you stop using Myspace? For people who grew up with it, the answers mirror the talking heads. I don’t know exactly when, but I stopped using it as often and eventually never went back.
Myspace came around at the exact right moment for me that it did for millions of other people around the world. I had started high school in 2003 and after growing up using chat services like MSN Messenger, Myspace was a giant leap forward. For two years in grades 9 and 10, it was the coolest thing in the world. I found so many artists that I still consider to be some of my favourites today including Bedouin Soundclash, MGMT, Arctic Monkeys and more. I would replay hot new songs like “Galang Galang”, “Rehab” and “Welcome to Jamrock” over and over again. I had a competition with a friend to see who amongst us could get to 200 friends first and when people figured out how to change the look of your wall by changing your CSS code, I consistently was looking for cool new ways to express myself.
Then in grade 11 in 2006 everything changed when Facebook became available and seemingly overnight as it timed with Myspace being sold to News Corp that the site was no longer cool and to stay on it was futile. I don’t recall ever signing back onto Myspace after making the switch.
The film covers the formation of the company, posited as originally a venture between Chris DeWolfe and Aber Whitcomb as they wanted to make money doing online advertising. Inspired by the first popular social media site Friendster, and with the eventual addition of Tom Anderson, Myspace was born.
The founders knew that in order to get people to become users, they needed a reason to. So the first people they reached out to were models and musicians as a key component of the site was users being able to upload pictures of themselves and that there was a music player. This gave those two groups the ability to share their work and interact with their burgeoning fan bases.
Early music adopters that essentially built their entire careers on the popularity they experienced are interviewed in the film including Chris Carrabba from Dashboard Confessional, Pierre Bouvier and Chuck Cuomo from Simple Plan (side note, this author starred in their second music video for I’d Do Anything back in 2002), Mike Kennerty from The All-American Rejects and Travie McCoy from Gym Class Heroes.
The film does spend a large portion of the interviews with the people who made it a cool and sexy platform to be on. That included Tila Tequila, a now controversial figure, who was recruited from being a car show model to be an early adopter and promoter and people like Jeffree Star, who went on to become a makeup influencer, alongside Jac Vanek, Hanna Beth and Zui Suicide who were crowned the “Scene Queens” for becoming the sites alternative fashion and lifestyle icons.
Along the way, the emo, alternative and pop punk scenes proved to be the most fertile in
connecting with fans, with the band Fall Out Boy and their record label Fueled By Ramen being seen as the ultimate tastemakers. Artists that played the Warped Tour utilized the site to connect with fans and grow their numbers.
A fun aspect the documentary incorporates is having subjects hold up their former Myspace profile picture in front of their faces before revealing how they currently look. This of course highlights the ubiquitous rise of selfies with the proliferation of cheap digital cameras that suddenly everyone had access to. The filmmakers even get interviewees to recreate an iconic way to take a selfie, dubbed the Myspace angle, which was shot from high and on an angle.
Of course you can’t talk about Myspace without talking about Tom Anderson. Known to everyone just as Tom, the site’s president and official public facing entity of the company was everyone’s first friend when they joined. We all know the iconic and unchanged photo of him sitting in front of a whiteboard grinning at the camera. To most users, that’s all he was as his actual profile was more for company updates than any real insight into him.
We learn he was a bit of a wunderkind, he played in a punk band, liked photography and was nomadic. DeWolfe, Whitcomb and other former employees of the site wax poetically about him, but his presence feels like a spectre that looms over everything. Since he sold the company in 2009, Anderson has given only one interview and that was to Tai Lopez in 2019. Even the archival footage shown in the film doesn’t really paint a picture of the man. We get lots of photos of him with Myspace celebrities and on the red carpet, but what makes him tick or thoughts on his legacy go ignored.
The film allows Tila Tequila to address the allegations against her of being a Nazi-sympathizer with her admitting the original photoshopped image she shared wearing Nazi regalia and holding a gun while standing in front of Auschwitz was shared because she enjoyed being edgy, while also not quite understanding the context of the picture.
She could conceivably be forgiven if it wasn’t for the fact that in the years since the 2015 incident that she has posted numerous blogs and social media posts both sympathizing and endorsing Nazi ideology and far-right politicians including being an early vocal supporter of Donald Trump. I suspect she is given no real pushback by Tommy Avallone as it is hard to tell the story of Myspace’s origins without including her and it was easier to not cause conflict.
The doc touches on the sale to News Corp, Ruport Murdoch’s company that also owns Fox News that was rightly criticized as the ultimate sell out. DeWolfe and Whitcomb who seem to be your typical tech bros still don’t seem to grasp how this was seen as the major reason of the sites demise as young millennials who used Myspace to help elect Barack Obama in 2008 didn’t want to have anything to do with the protagonist who was influential in convincing the world to invade Iraq in 2001.
The film does a great job reminiscing on the past, in what was a major cultural touchstone the site was. How the interconnectedness of file sharing, the creation of YouTube, and the rise of broadband internet allowed the world to connect and be one of the last moments of mono-culture before our increasingly siloed world took hold.
Myspace was seen during the 2026 Hot Docs film festival. Thank you to Scandal Co-Active for the screener.
