Well, it seems to be functioning as intended. But you can never tell if things like this work until the afterglow is over.

I am going to use the myspace example again. When people first started sharing music online with places like mp3.com it was exciting and new. A lot of good music could be found and you would hear a lot of things that the music industry wouldn't normally accept. Quite a few deserving people got attention that they wouldn't have gotten otherwise, and even a couple of my friends got published by reputable labels because of it.

Look at it nowadays. MP3.com doesn't exist any longer as it was, and the only people using myspace for musicians and similar sites are music people trying to get as large a friends list as possible. Nobody uses them to find exciting new music because they are too used to the same formulaic stuff.