MySpace sure likes it some lower-case i's -- and any startup with digital music expertise. On the heels of its acquisition of music service iLike -- reportedly for about $20 million -- the News Corp.
unit is rumored to be in late stage negotiations to buy music streaming service imeem.
"The imeem acquisition isn't yet finalized, we've heard from sources, and awaits approval from
various stakeholders,"
report TechCrunch, which doesn't know the likely price of the acquisition.
Claiming to have confirmed the negotiations, Peter Kafka at MediaMemo says he hasn't heard a price yet
either, but "I wouldn't expect much, given that this deal, like the iLike purchase MySpace made earlier this year, is an 'acqhire' -- News Corp.'s social network/portal wants to buy imeem for its
'sales team, engineering, Snocap and other Imeem IP,' a person familiar with the transaction tells me."
Why imeem? "MySpace, which spent a year or so developing MySpace Music on its
own, wants more music heft,"
writes paidContent. "Acquiring iLike made it part of the new Google Music Search and
brought in new talent ... Adding iMeem would bring more of that social element and an established user base; it had 15 million uniques in September, according to comScore."
The news
comes amid speculation that MySpace Music is considering moving to a paid model, since the cost of free streaming is making its current model unsustainable,
reports GigaOm. "News Corp. digital chief Jon Miller expressed some interest in such a move in an onstage
interview conducted by paidContent's Rafat Ali in Monaco on Thursday, noting that he believes in the 'freemium' music model conceptually, even if a practical and sustainable version hasn't appeared
yet."
In late October, MySpace chief executive
Owen Van Natta told the
Financial Times that the once reigning social network was no longer interested in competing with Facebook. Positioning MySpace solely as an online hub for music and entertainment, Van Natta
said, "Facebook is not our competition ... We're very focused on a different space."
Read the whole story at Tech Crunch et al. »
It's a shame to see News Corp pick up space fundamentally built on the "freemium" model. Large media incumbents don't know how to monetize grass roots traction. The old business models aren't applicable to a space that is design to create value during & after consumption, and not before. I was really rooting for a company like Google to pick up IMeem and incorporate a cloud model EARLY (in the music space) for the Droid device.