Former social network turned social music sharing service MySpace appears to be Lazarus rising in 2015 with news that traffic to the site is booming.

According to the Wall Street Journal Myspace traffic hit 50.6 million unique viewers in November 2014,  up 575 percent from the same month in 2013.

Tim Vanderhook, chief executive of Viant Inc., the parent company of Specific Media (the owner of Myspace) told the paper that MySpace was attracting a vibrant audience of 17 to 25-year-olds, particularly music and entertainment fans.

Thursdays

One rather strange aspect to the resurgent MySpace is much of the traffic comes on Thursdays.

The company claims that the once a week traffic surge is due to Throwback Thursday, the popular retro photo sharing ritual that has been growing in popularity.

“MySpace was an early photo-sharing platform,” Vanderhook told the paper, “So we still see a lot of people coming back to access old photos. They may not visit every day but they come back once a week or once a month.”

Although the site has radically changed from its days as a pre-Facebook Facebook, user accounts from MySpace’s glory days are still available on the site.

MySpace 2015

If you haven’t visited MySpace recently, which would likely be everyone reading this, the site relaunched in September 2012 with a design we described at the time as a combination of Google+ and sideways Tumblr.

Partially owned by Justin Timberlake, on the outside it appears to be a more social version of Spotify and Vevo; users can follow artists and listen to and share music audio and video, and can still do basic things such as posting photos, although in that regard it’s partially Pinterest like.

Ironically given the history of the site, you can log into it using your Facebook account.

MySpace also creates some original content, including music sessions featuring a variety or artists.

While MySpace isn’t going to break any records in terms of traffic numbers, the comeback is credit to the management at Specific Media, although having purchased the site for $35 million they’d want to be working hard in trying to make a go of it.

 Image credit: MySpace.