In “The Social Network,” the hit movie about Mark Zuckerberg creating Facebook, Justin Timberlake played Facebook’s founding president, Sean Parker. Parker is humiliatingly ousted after a drug-related arrest, although the situation is largely dramatized in the film. In real life, Parker also co-founded the music-sharing service Napster, and while he successfully started a revolution that the music industry has still not recovered from, Parker could not stop Napster from being shutdown by a barrage of vengeful lawsuits. Contradictory to how Parker’s Facebook and Napster experiences ended, his latest efforts seem to have been quite successful considering he’s currently heavily invested in, and on the board of, the flourishing music streaming platform, Spotify.
Justin Timberlake’s ties to social media and music sharing/streaming platforms also follow him off-screen, and like Sean Parker, his efforts have resulted in polarizing levels of success. Despite JT’s iconic status, a surprisingly few amount of fans know that he was recently a partial owner of Myspace, although this is probably since many are shocked to find out that Myspace even still exists. While it’s unlikely that had much to do with business strategy, Timberlake was somewhat of a spokesperson in the relaunching of the “new Myspace” back in 2013. 
The relaunch, accompanied by a new Justin Timberlake single, turned the once over-powering social network into somewhat of a mix between a social media and music streaming platform, designed to “bridge the gap between artists and fans.” Artists whose music is streaming on Myspace now have an artist page and can see info about their fans and those listening to their music, to assist in segmenting their fanbase and marketing their music more efficiently. There are also various other ways in which the new Myspace has differentiated itself, including its record label partnerships, which have collaboratively carved it into a somewhat niche service. While this strategy might at one time have seemed promising, Myspace increasingly appears to be a trend forever left in the first decade of the 21st century. It’s currently a ghost of a platform, and a bust of an investment on the part of Justin Timberlake, who has 1.6 million connections on Myspace and 52.2 million followers on Twitter.
Unlike his failure to revive a hardly breathing social media platform behind-the-scenes, Timberlake has ironically been very successfully at running his personal social media accounts, on platforms that are actually still relevant (for the time being). JT’s accounts exemplify how to communicate personalized and engaging, content marketing/public relation strategies on social media, as well as how to ideally balance the promotion of a brand, and contribute to social media as an interactive, recreational user. When asked about Myspace, Timberlake said himself, “I can’t speak for every artist, but I can tell you that if I have X amount of followers on Twitter, I’d rather that number be smaller and know that they’re all engaging versus throwing comments all over the place that have nothing to do with anything.”
The language of his posts are super friendly, and it actually feels like Justin is the one behind the keyboard. He talks a lot about his personal life and interests, like about his family or love for the Grizzlies, and posts about important current events without trying to 
spin the content to relate back to him. He is frequently contributing as a recreational social media user, not just as an official account trying to market a brand. He’s constantly tweeting back to fans, expressing appreciation or congratulations to a friend/colleague, or posting concert pics on Instagram, thanking his fans and everyone involved. Finally, when Justin is trying to market something he’s been working on, he often either retweets/shares 
someone else’s post, or accompanies his post with a personalized note.
Like the character he embodied in “The Social Network,” Justin Timberlake has earned somewhat polarizing levels of success in his social media/music platform related efforts. Despite Timberlake and Specific Media’s once intriguing attempts to take these markets by storm, it is now clear that they didn’t do enough to revitalize a slowly dying Myspace, which was purchased earlier this month by Time Inc. Contradictory to this social media failure, Timberlake’s personal Twitter account has the 10th most followers at 52.3 million, and he has a combined 61.5 million fans/followers on Instagram and Facebook. While the intensity and length of JT’s elite status attribute to the majority of these impressive metrics, substantial credit is due to his personal and engaging social media presence.
Musicians & Social Media 