Is Myspace Coming Back? Owners Confirm Relaunch Plans
Two decades after it defined the early social internet, Myspace may be gearing up for another act. Chris and Tim Vanderhook, the brothers who bought the platform through their company Specific Media in 2011, have confirmed they are actively working on a relaunch, though they still will not say when.
The disclosure came through an unlikely channel: a new documentary from filmmaker Tommy Avallone that traces the site's rise, fall, and strange afterlife. In it, the brothers offer their clearest public statements yet on their intentions. "We still own Myspace," Tim Vanderhook said, according to Parade. "We are stewards of the Myspace brand at this point, and we are going to relaunch Myspace. We're just waiting for the right time to do it. And if that one doesn't work, we'll do it again."
That last line is telling. This would not be the Vanderhooks' first attempt at reviving the site. In an interview with Fox Business, Tim acknowledged an earlier rebuild that never found its footing. "We really tried to modernize it, but it was a different company at that point," he said. "It wasn't the same Myspace." Chris added that by the time they took on that redesign, Myspace had already cycled through four sets of management and chief executives, leaving a user base that seemed exhausted by constant reinvention rather than energized by it.
What a new version might look like remains largely undefined. The brothers have not released a launch date, design mockups, or a feature list. But they have pointed to a guiding idea: build something that departs from the algorithm-driven, endless-scroll model that now defines most social platforms. Coverage of the documentary suggests the ambition is to recenter the site around music discovery and personal creative expression, the qualities that once separated Myspace from its rivals, rather than engagement metrics.
One notable figure will not be part of it. Tom Anderson, the site's co-founder and the automatic first friend on nearly every Myspace profile in its heyday, left the company years ago and has no role in the current ownership or in the relaunch under discussion.
The renewed interest arrives amid a broader wave of 2000s and 2010s nostalgia moving through youth culture online, one loosely captured by the internet shorthand "2026 is the new 2016." It also arrives in a media environment far less hospitable to lightly moderated social platforms than the one Myspace grew up in. Regulators and parents alike are scrutinizing how young people use social media far more closely than they did during the site's original run, a dynamic that will likely shape whatever the Vanderhooks eventually build, whether they design for it explicitly or not.
Myspace, launched in 2003, was for a time the largest social network in the world before Facebook eclipsed it in the late 2000s. It never fully vanished. A scaled-down version still operates under Viant Technology, the ad-tech company that now houses Specific Media. What the Vanderhooks are describing is not a resurrection so much as a rebuild on top of a brand that, by their own account, has already survived several failed reinventions.
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