At the close of 2010, MySpace caught a break when it partnered with ReverbNation.

It finally gave the artists on the social network a great set of tools to connect with their fans.

But did MySpace's alliance with ReverbNation hurt the social network more than it helped?

Given that MySpace already found itself nearing irrelevance, empowering artists with an e-mail marketing client may have hammered the final nail in its coffin.

When Hypebot posted a chart that detailed MySpace's traffic race to the bottom, Kirsten, an artist and music marketer herself, shared a theory as to why bad may have turned to worse once MySpace partnered with ReverbNation. She manages the social media pages for her band, ARCTIC, and for six other artists through a management client she works with. "MySpace has always infuriated me for their complete disregard for basic website usability, and the redesign fixed too little, too late," she says. "When ReverbNation and MySpace announced that they had added the ability to message all your MySpace fans at once, I thought that might finally be something useful." At last, the network could deliver on its true potental.

"Instead, every one of my artists' inboxes are filled with event invites and mailing list messages from other bands - not from fans.

In the past two months I have seen exactly one fan letter.

Between the constant spam and the problematic interface, I don't like to engage with Myspace at all, and feel that it would be kinder if the poor site were gently put out of its misery as soon as possible."

Kirsten says that this amount is "a far cry from five years ago." In other words, ReverbNation is doing fine, the trouble is that there aren't fans on the otherside anymore, and artists that still use MySpace are left to marketing to each other.

The fans are gone. The addition of ReverbNation came "a few years" too late.