It finally happened — though not quite when, or in the way, most coverage suggests. Myspace's owners said they intend to relaunch the platform that, for a stretch of the 2000s, was the internet for an entire generation. What they did not say is nearly as interesting as what they did.

Correction · August 8, 2026

This article previously listed "The Top 8 is back" and "Profile songs return" under a heading reading "What's confirmed", and its description asserted both as settled fact. No source we could locate supports either. It also placed the announcement in early August 2026; the origin publication is July 17, 2026. The article has been corrected and re-tiered by evidence.

Who's behind it

The statement comes from Chris and Tim Vanderhook, the brothers behind advertising technology company Viant, which has owned Myspace since 2011. That detail matters: this isn't a startup buying a dead brand for buzz. It's the people who have quietly kept the lights on deciding the moment might be right to turn them back up.

It was said on camera, in Tommy Avallone's documentary Myspace, which premiered at Hot Docs in Toronto on April 27, 2026. People published the quote on July 17 — without saying which brother said it, though E! News and Mashable both attribute it to Tim. The news cycle picked it up on July 31, two weeks later.

What's confirmed

One thing, and it is worth quoting rather than paraphrasing, because the paraphrases are where this story goes wrong:

"We still own Myspace. 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 is the entire confirmed record. No launch date. "Waiting for the right time" is the whole schedule. No features, no team, no timeline.

What's reported, but not primary-sourced

  • No algorithmic feed. Fox Business writes that the brothers "want to create a platform that feels different from current social media platforms" — reported speech, with no quote behind it. The anti-algorithm remarks we could actually trace belong to Chris DeWolfe, who co-founded Myspace, stepped down as its CEO in April 2009, and is a consulting producer on the documentary. He doesn't own Myspace and has no stated role in the relaunch.

What's circulating without a source

These are repeated almost everywhere. We could not trace any of them to a statement by anyone. That doesn't make them false — only unsupported.

  • The Top 8. The Fox Business report doesn't mention it at all. Parade's headline asserts it; Parade's body uses the Top 8 only as nostalgic scene-setting, attached to nothing. And Mashable — the outlet that several of the others credit as their source — says it outright: the owners "have not announced a launch date, development timeline, or which classic Myspace features might return."
  • Profile songs. Never mentioned in the origin article. They do appear throughout the coverage, but as nostalgia rather than as a plan — Mashable's version is "before you start choosing a profile song, there are still plenty of unanswered questions." We found nobody committing to them.
  • Tom Anderson isn't involved. Asserted everywhere, sourced nowhere. The earliest instance we found is an E! News headline; its body carries no Anderson quote and nothing that supports the assertion. The widely-copied version — that he "sold the company in 2005" — is wrong twice over: News Corporation acquired Myspace's parent company, Intermix Media, in 2005, and Anderson was still Myspace's president in April 2009. He is also not silent on the subject. In January 2026 he told his Threads followers "Show me you care and we will talk MySpace," then deleted the post. What nobody has done is ask him about the Vanderhooks' plan.

We've since done that work claim by claim: every Myspace relaunch claim, traced back to the first outlet that printed it — including which ones turn out to trace back to nothing at all.

The big unanswered questions

The statement leaves the most important questions open. Will original accounts and friend lists be restored? Myspace infamously lost twelve years of user-uploaded music in a 2019 server migration, so the archive question is loaded. Will profiles be customizable the way they used to be — the pasted code, the glitter graphics, the cursor trails? And how would music licensing work in a world where the profile song has to coexist with streaming platforms?

We're maintaining a running, sourced answer to all of this on the Myspace Relaunch Tracker, tiered the same way this page is, and updated as news breaks.

Why this might actually work this time

Myspace has "come back" before — the 2013 Justin Timberlake-era redesign pivoted the site toward music and never recovered its audience. What's different in 2026 is the mood. A social network you visit on purpose, rather than one optimized to hold you hostage, is a genuinely interesting pitch after a decade of algorithmic sameness.

But note that the pitch above is ours and the press's, not theirs. Nobody at Viant has described the product. That's the honest state of it: an intention, stated once, by people with the means to act on it and no stated plan for doing so.