Billy Talent Help Launch MySpace Canada

The folks at MySpace recently launched MySpace Canada and to kick things off, they set up a secret show with one of our nation's biggest bands, Billy Talent.

"I think for all the secret shows we do, we try to find someone who, when playing a small venue, people are excited about it," says MySpace president and co-founder Tom Anderson, who most people know as that guy on everybody's friends list.

"The band has really been embraced by the Canadian audience, there's a lot of excitement about them, and we're always looking for something a little punk rock, a little bit edgy."

With MySpace Canada, Anderson has started partnerships with VideoFACT and the Just For Laughs festival to offer content geared to Canadian users. Feist's new album, The Reminder, was premiered on the site.

"We feature Canadian music, filmmakers, that sort of thing," Anderson explains. "We plan to do a lot more events and hire people on the ground there to give the site more of a Canadian feel to the content and programs.

"There's always little things that we don't think about with the culture that we have to change on the site here and there that we really won't know until we get more feedback from the users there. Lots of Canadian users have been using the site for several years, but what we've started to do now is we've made a French translation and localized the content — things like comedy festivals last year, this secret show coming up this Wednesday, just to let Canada know we're here."

With MySpace being the most established networking site around, newer sites like Facebook could potentially pose a problem for them, but Anderson doesn't worry too much about it.

"When it was earlier, when we'd only been around two or three years, people said [it was a fad] a lot. People used Friendster as a quintessential example of that. They talk about how it died out, and the thing about that is Friendster never had more than a million users worldwide, or in the U.S. We're in about 70 million in the U.S. right now, so to say that it would just fade doesn't make a lot of sense.

"It's like saying Yahoo or MSN, or sites of that magnitude, just suddenly disappear. It's not really something we worry about. MySpace is a platform or a medium very much like Hotmail, and it provides so much more than that, so it's a part of people's daily lives. It's very hard to imagine people just dropping it for something else."

Part of the reason Anderson feels confident is that his site is moving into different media to expand its range.

"We want to have a big push on international markets and see more and more countries online," he says. "We're moving heavily into mobile so you can use MySpace on a mobile phone.

"We're working out deals with big carriers and making applications for the phones, so it's not just surfing the web on a phone, it's an actual application that you download. It'll be really easy to use, so, wherever you go, you can use your phone to check your MySpace page."