EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing you an evening longread to enjoy. With the news cycle dominated by the coronavirus situation, we know it can be hard to take your mind off what’s happening.

So we want to bring you an interesting read every weekday evening to help transport you somewhere else.

We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.

MySpace and music

Stereogum takes a look at how MySpace changed music, and brought us a generation of new music stars. 

(Stereogum, approx 65 mins reading time)

Like white belts and orange cans of Sparks, Myspace so thoroughly defined the way the ’00s looked, sounded and felt that it was probably destined to not make it out of the decade alive, even if, technically, a website continues to exist at the www.myspace.com domain. But at Myspace’s height — roughly 2005 through 2008 — the website changed the way artists and fans found each other and how record labels and buzz-seeking blogs found fresh meat. Artists like Panic! At The Disco, Arctic Monkeys, Soulja Boy, Lily Allen, and Colbie Caillat would become pop stars in part because of their presence on the site, whereas artists such as Los Campesinos! or Nicole Atkins would eventually settle into cult careers after navigating through the sudden, unexpected attention the site could often generate. But not every artist found world-beating success through the site. No matter how hard they tried.

Read all of the Evening Longreads here>