MySpace hasn’t had a good year. It’s been slowly dropping in traffic like a ship unwittingly taking on water, ousted the MySpace founders, hired a new CEO, and most recently, slashed 30% of its workforce. Dark times, indeed.

However, despite all of these ominous signs, there has been one gleaming bright spot: MySpace Music. Specifically, MySpace is still a very popular hub for the music and entertainment community. At least, that’s what we thought until we saw some depressing numbers from Hitwise. The summary: MySpace is losing its entertainment edge.

MySpace’s Decreasing Influence

According to Hitwise General Manager Bill Tancer, MySpace used to provide over 35% of worldwide traffic to websites in the Entertainment-Multimedia category – that would be around 2006. Its contribution to music and band websites specifically was over 10% in 2007, a reflection of its strength at the time. Now? Well, the graphs and the numbers speak for themselves:

Note: these graphs measure clickstream, or the websites someone visits right before or after the site in question (i.e. MySpace).

From 35% to 9.4% of traffic? That’s a giant drop in the span of three years. If MySpace is to make a comeback, it needs to keep its influence in the music and entertainment industry. Unfortunately, these graphs indicate that it may already be too late.

Tags: hitwise, myspace