MySpace lives? Site signs up 1 million new users in a month

Can MySpace become culturally relevant again?

It’s still too soon to tell, but Tim and Chris Vanderhook, the two young investors who bought the faded social networking site from News Corp. in June 2011 now have some semi-solid reason to hope.

On Monday morning, MySpace announced that it had over 1 million new sign-ups in the last 30 days. The company also said MySpace.com is receiving an average of 40,000 new registrations daily.

And more good news: Traffic to the site was up in January for the first time in a year, according to a report in the New York Times.

All very promising, right? Well, sort of. The New York Times report also noted that MySpace’s traffic was down almost a quarter from when the Vanderhooks bought the site.

Still, the numbers show that there may be life yet in a site that many had written off as all but dead -- including News Corp. which paid $580 million for MySpace in 2005, and then sold it for $35 million in 2011, long after Facebook had won the social networking battle.

The Vanderhooks, who bought MySpace with Justin Timberlake as a major investor, are attempting to reframe the site as a destination for music and entertainment, rather than a social networking platform.

They say they attribute the site’s recent growth to the introduction of a new music player that gives users access to a music library of 42 million songs.

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