by Richard Kastelein

OP/ED - Techcrunch is reporting that Myspace UK traffic has halved in the past six months and there have been layoffs right and left in their London offices.  Numbers are down from 10 million visits at the start of the year to around 5 million as of the end of June 2010. Late last year Eventim cut a deal with Myspace UK to sell tickets - which, based on the numbers from Techcrunch can't be a good scenario for them. And the fact is, Myspace has been a fertile ground for emerging music and bands for a number of years - with many B-List artists using the platform as their core site. That also spells bad news for new acts - if numbers are down as low as reported.

So where are they all going?

Facebook UK it seems. Second only to the USA, Great Britain is number two with Facebook usage with 26,543,600 users as of 07/06/2010. Ironically,  Facebook.com is the third largest source of traffic to Myspace. 

MySpace UK music manager has been sacked - and it seems artists are concentrating more on Facebook and Twitter for marketing according to the Sandbox. 

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook says he is expecting a billion users on Facebook in the near future. That's one seventh of the world population. Lady Gaga has ten million followers herself.  Lady Gaga's reach is unparalleled by anything on Myspace. The 24-year-old "Poker Face" singer is the first living person to attract more than 10 million Facebook - beating out US President Barak Obama. Gaga is fourth on the list at Twitter with over 4 million followers and has another half million signed up at Youtube. She is the  most followed global social media entity across any genre, including consumer brands. On Facebook - Linkin Park has over 7 million fans, Justin Bieber is nearing 7 million, Taylor Swift is sitting on 6.5 million, with Metallica nearing 6 million. 

Will artists start selling ticket inventory via Facebook in the future? Good question. It can't be that hard with that kind of reach.  Particularly since we wrote recently about the rumours of Facebook teaming up with Eventbrite. Eventbrite has already teamed up with Linkedin and seen record growth with over 40 million dollars worth of tickets - in the first quarter of 2010 alone.