| Who Is Tom Anderson? | Page 2 / 2 | Print this article |
Whatever the case, with 230,000 new registrations a day, MySpace is an advertiser’s dream, and its genius lies in the fact that none of its members seem to realise it. On the other hand, there is something disturbing about the vitriol with which some people have attacked the MySpace team. When the question of Tom’s real age was raised recently, the idea that he may have been misleading MySpace members about any of his personal details (despite the fact that many members are far from honest about themselves on their own profiles) caused a surprisingly strong reaction. ‘Tom is not my friend’ t-shirts have started appearing on the internet, as have fake Rupert Murdoch profile pages with titles such as FUQ RUPERT
or BILLIONAIRE TYRANT. Whatever your personal views about News Corp, it must be acknowledged that MySpace still upholds many of the ideals it set out with. Musicians still feel overwhelmingly positive towards it as an effective marketing tool. De Wolfe claims that the site will never charge bands to promote their music or use pop-up ads as long as he is in charge and, although both men’s contracts expire this month, the rumour is that they have signed a two-year extension to say on as CEO and President, so that could be for a long time.
‘Tom is not my friend’ t-shirts have started appearing on the internet
Tom still has his fans. According to an article by Patricia Sellers in Fortune magazine, he is intimately involved with the company, ‘the soul of MySpace’, scouring the profile pages for unsigned bands for hours at a time, looking for promising new talent to sign up to a new venture, MySpace records. The company have announced a partnership with Skype, enabling its members to make free internet phone calls even when they are not online. Tom discovered kSolo, an internet karaoke service he thought would be perfect for MySpace users and bought it up, it is clear that he has the common touch. De Wolfe sums up the MySpace ethic in a series of well aimed catch phrases, but ones that ring true to the site’s many fans, ‘We’re not deciding what’s cool. Our users are’, he says, ‘MySpace is all about letting people be what they want to be’. With that in mind, it’s not surprising that Tom’s function on the site is to be both ever-present and two-dimensional. His blandness as the face of MySpace is entirely appropriate to a site which advocates self-promotion through re-invention, and his assertion that, ‘I’d like to do this as long as it’s fun, and that could be a long, long time’, is not incompatible with the self he promotes online. As Peter Chernin of News Corp points out ‘Tom lives inside the product’; whether he invented it or not, Tom Anderson is MySpace.
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