MySpace had a mass bloodletting of employees yesterday, firing 500 people or about half of its staff.

It’s not unexpected that these former employees, some of whom were apparently working under the impression that their jobs would be safe despite the reported decline of the company, would feel a profound sense of betrayal after the fact.

And then there is the anonymous email TechCrunch received from a former MySpace employee who accused the now CEO of MySpace Mike Jones and his executives for “knowingly” using its employees, falsely reassuring and “inspiring them,” and thus driving hundreds of people to give “20 hour days, even 48 hour sleepless stints, for a company that everyone else in the world said was dead.”

From the email:

Jones reassured those loyal, hard working employees that News corp was \”on board\” with the plan to relaunch Myspace as \”social entertainment\”, and he had been promised they would have patience and give the new site time to be successful before making changes.

As it turns out, Mr. Jones and his lieutenants knowingly *used* their employees, working them hard, making them give up time with their friends and families, knowing all along that no matter how hard they worked, and how successful their efforts, many of them would be rewarded with layoffs.

The email is remarkably bitter. The former employee goes on to accuse the MySpace executives of building “stealth projects” such as “project Burn” and “plotting secret backroom deals to prevent a sale of Myspace by News Corp” instead of doing their jobs.

Of course, an email from a former, fired employee may not paint the most reliable portrait of what really went on at MySpace. But it serves as a sad reminder of what life is like in a failing company.

Read the rest of the email at TechCrunch >

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MySpace may be looking to reduce its staff significantly, as multiple sources claim the social network is planning significant layoffs that could affect up to 50% of its employees.

Sources close to the situation have told All Things Digital that management is in the midst of figuring out more drastic cost-cutting measures that owner News Corp. asked for in the wake of MySpace’s decreased revenue and traffic. These possible layoffs, which have yet to be determined, could affect employees located outside the U.S. MySpace has declined to comment on the subject at this time.

This rumor comes not too long after MySpace made significant efforts to revamp its image. October saw the beginnings of a new era for MySpace, when the site announced its intentions to become more of a leading entertainment hub “socially powered by the passions of fans and curators” instead of being a “place for friends.” Earlier this month, the Hijacks program was introduced, allowing certain celebrities — like the Black Eyed Peas and Jack Black — to “take over” the site for short periods of time. And last month, MySpace partnered up with Facebook, making it possible for users to log in with Facebook.

But it seems these changes haven’t done much to improve MySpace’s fortunes, and News Corp. bigwigs might not expect a significant turnaround to happen. There are rumors that MySpace will get sold off . As of now, it only looks like we’ll start seeing if there’s some truth to any of this speculation in the new year.

Every dude with a band has most likely built a MySpace page in an effort to “get into that social media thing, and, like, self-promote, man,” but until now, the site hasn’t offered that much utility for musicians looking to promote themselves.

However, the former “place for friends” has recently announced an integration with marketing and promotion platform ReverbNation that will give artists a handy collection of tools that they can use to track analytics (both on MySpace and on other social media sites) and organize and contact their fans. The new contact tools are an extension of Reverb’s Fan Relationship Management application, FanReach.

FanReach will allow bands to port all their contacts into the MySpace environment, from which they can reach out to fans from a consolidated dashboard. In a sense, FanReach is an e-mailing marketing service — think MailChip — that lets bands zero in on certain demographics by sorting their fans by age, location, etc. and create a more targeted mailing campaign. They can also check open rates, campaign success, etc.

This suite of tools will also let artists track activity across social networks like Twitter, Facebook andYouTube, and share song embeds.

We imagine that this new service will cut down on the spammy nature of most MySpace interactions, and allow bands to tap into and monitor the fanbase they have already built on the site.

The app is free for all artists and works the same within both MySpace and ReverbNation. A premium version is also available for musicians who want to use the app’s library of pre-made mailing templates, employ a custom design or who want to e-mail more than 400 fans.

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Why MySpace?

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At this juncture, readers may be wondering, “Why the hell would any platform integrate with MySpace? Is MySpace even still around?” The confusion may even grow more intense when one hears that ReverbNation has just hit the one-million artist mark (Translation: It’s not hurting for members).

CEO Michael Doernberg is aware of the public opinion of MySpace. “The first question is: ‘Why did we do this deal?’…. MySpace is still the de facto music destination on the web,” he says. “If you want to go to single place to see a comprehensive presentation of a band, MySpace is still the biggest. There’s a lot of fan relationships built up in MySpace. It’s really up to us to try to unlock that MySpace value for the artist,” he says.

Efforts like this, along with a renewed multi-year search and advertising deal with Google, could serve to keep MySpace relevant, despite recent financial woes.

Check out the new artist tool and let us know what you think of this recent integration.

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Fan Reach

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Stats Tools

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You’ve probably heard by now: the new MySpace is coming. It is not only redesigned, but it is the start of a completely new direction and strategy for what was once the world’s pre-eminent social network.

As we reported earlier this week, the new MySpace is supposed to be a transformation from “a place for friends” to “a social entertainment destination.” While MySpace profiles, friend lists and newsfeeds will all remain once the transition is complete, MySpace will no longer focus on those things. Instead, it will focus on engaging a “Generation Y” audience with the entertainment and entertainers that they love. New features like Topic Pages will help users follow their favorite TV shows, music artists, actors and games.

MySpace is also introducing a new type of user: the curator. Users that exhibit a following or expertise in a specific social trend or entertainment topic can gain curator status, which gives them access to an array of tools for facilitating content discovery and leading fans of a specific subculture. The company believes that when users connect with active curators, their engagement with MySpace goes up dramatically. This is one of the things CEO Mike Jones told me during a conversation we had last week about the redesign.

The company is focused on encouraging four core behaviors: discovery, collection, connection and creation. MySpace wants its users to quickly discover new and interesting entertainment content via Topic Pages, recommendations and the newsfeed. It also wants to encourage curators to facilitate this discovery with Topic Pages and Entertainment Hubs.

Connecting fans, curators and entertainers is the third key behavior MySpace wants to foster, while the final behavior, creation, is something users already do with their profiles. MySpace knows that most profiles are hideous abominations of good taste, so it’s encouraging users to switch to the much-cleaner Profile 3.0 design with some hip, artist-designed themes.

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Is “Social Entertainment” the Right Move?

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The redesign seems to be an affirmation of something we’ve known for a long time: MySpace’s strength is in entertainment, not social networking. It lost the technology battle long ago to Facebook, and only now is it realizing that it has to get out of its giant shadow in order to spark a turnaround.

MySpace’s new strategy has some major risks. The big one is that it has now established itself as a product of a smaller niche (entertainment for “Generation Y”). In other words, it has a smaller potential userbase than Facebook or even Twitter. As I’ve said before though, MySpace lost the war with Facebook long ago.

As a friend close to MySpace told me earlier this week, the company had to “go for it.” Staying the course would have doomed it to oblivion. The new design is a realization of who really visits MySpace and why they’re really there. Today’s youth connect with each other through Facebook, but many of them still get their entertainment fix from MySpace. The company’s strategic focus on finding better ways to deliver entertainment content in addicting doses is refreshing and the best (and most realistic) strategy at its disposal.

While there are no guarantees that the new strategy will turn things around, the combination of a focused direction and a stylish design gives me hope that MySpace may actually be able to pull off one hell of a comeback. Its biggest obstacle will be convincing people to give it a second chance.