Much in the spirit of MySpace’s incredible lack of pace in upgrading their service to cope with the demands of it’s users, they have finally upgraded their service for music profiles. With a ridiculous inability to keep up with other music profile websites, MySpace’s previous insistence on having to paste CSS code to customise the look of your profile was irritating at best. This is especially so when the ‘free’ MySpace editors that are all over the internet put their own advertisements in the code they give you. So it was to my delight having logged into MySpace for the first time in months to see that it appears to be changing.

The upgrade for your MySpace music profile offers many new features, including:

• The ability to customise the look of your page or choose from a number of themes.
• A tidier layout which you can now customise. You can add or remove ‘modules’ and select where they go on your page.
• You can now have 25 songs on your page instead of the previous 10. This is excellent. I still remember the days when you could only have 4!
• Incorporate your own header into the page.

These were the main features that interested me. So let’s take a look at what you have to do:

Use the control panel to make changes

After you’ve confirmed you wish to upgrade your profile, then re-confirmed you want to do it (I have no idea why either) you’ll be brought back to your profile with a floating control panel to the left. It’s here that you control the look of your page.

I’ll say now that this won’t give you complete freedom on the look of your page, but you’ll be able to customise the background colour and/or image, choose from a number of fonts, edit the main colours of the theme and select what ‘modules’ you’d like to use.

Select from a large number of themes

Alternatively, if sifting through tons of options doesn’t suit you, you can choose from a number of preset themes available. The background colours/image and font colours are automatically put in place so it’s just a case of picking whatever you fancy. There’s a mixture of good themes and downright ugly ones but there’s probably something to suit your taste if you want the easy option.

Another important feature is the ability to choose what ‘modules’ your page displays and add new ones too. Let’s say for instance you’re not a touring musician, you can get rid of the ‘Shows/Events’ module with a simple click. There’s a decent selection of modules to choose from here including photo and video galleries, a module displaying groups you belong to as well as the very handy ‘HTML Box’ which allows you to put in any HTML code you want. So if you want to put a Twitter feed on your MySpace page, you can do it now with ease. Hopefully MySpace will build on this and add more widgets in the future based on feedback from their users.

All in all, this new feature is pretty decent from MySpace and will at least make everything a lot easier to maintain. Some will argue that the customising features are rather limited, but to be honest, it’d be nice if all the profiles on MySpace had some sort of uniformity – I reckon the user experience would be greatly improved. All they have to do now is get rid of the irritating and resource-hungry adverts and videos they place everywhere to speed up the website and MySpace would actually be worth using again.

Please Note: Finding where to upgrade your profile is fairly well hidden on their website. Click the link below to upgrade your profile and check out the new features.

Upgrade Your MySpace Music Profile Here