In a statement reminiscent of John Lennon's proclamation in 1966 that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus", MySpace founder Tom Anderson told German newspaper Der Spiegel that the service had replaced MTV as the media nexus of popular culture for teenagers.

SPIEGEL: MySpace also appears to have changed popular culture.

Anderson: I think we have replaced MTV. MySpace is more convenient. You can search for things, while MTV is just delivering things to you. On MySpace you can pick your own channel and go where you want. That's why TV viewership is dropping among the MySpace generation. I started using the Internet in 1999. That was pretty late. But as soon as I did I just stopped watching TV. The idea of sitting down and waiting for a TV show at a certain time, I couldn't do this anymore. The Internet is a better form of entertainment to me.

Co-founder Chris DeWolfe went on to suggest that the service will be able to avoid the ageing problems inherent in broadcast shows:

DeWolfe: As a TV manager, the best thing to happen is your show gets really hot. But you always know that it's going to lose popularity and become uncool at some point when you run out of ideas or people just get tired. We don't have to deal with that because we are not creating the program -- our users are. They can continually reinvent what's new and what's cool, based on changing their profiles, or new bands coming in. So we are not tasked with that difficult challenge like somebody like MTV. There are 140 million different channels to watch on our site.

The interview is available online here.