When MySpace changed ownership last June, it was in free fall. MySpace, the pioneering social media and music site, which at its peak in 2008 was attracting 75.9 million unique visitors a month, was down to about 33 million, according to comScore, and it was bleeding users every month.
Tim and Chris Vanderhook, the young investors who bought the site for $35 million from News Corporation — which paid $580 million for it in 2005 — have since been trying to reinvent MySpace, emphasizing its role as a music and entertainment hub. And they finally have some numbers to brag about.
Since December, when it introduced a new music player, the site has signed up one million new users, the company is expected to announce on Monday. And according to data released by comScore last week, monthly traffic on MySpace rose in January, the first increase in almost a year; at 25.1 million, it was an improvement of 4 percent from the month before. But it was still down almost a quarter from when the Vanderhooks bought MySpace with the singer and actor Justin Timberlake.
“We went from zero signups per day to 40,000,” said Chris Vanderhook, the company’s chief operating officer.
Mr. Vanderhook attributes the growth to MySpace’s integration with Facebook and Twitter, and the size of its music library. Since it still has full licensing deals with thousands of record labels, as well as songs from untold numbers of unsigned acts, MySpace has a library of 42 million tracks, several times more than Spotify or Rhapsody.
Last month MySpace announced a deal with Panasonic for MySpace TV, which will allow social sharing and commenting on music videos and television shows.
The new focus, Mr. Vanderhook said, was not to compete with Facebook as a social network, but to be the conduit for music and other forms of entertainment that can be shared through other networks.