Remember MySpace Music? It was supposed to put online music streaming on the the right track. But with all the layoffs, shrinking audience and turmoil at parent MySpace, MySpace Music is singing the blues. According to comScore, only 17 million people in the U.S. visited MySpace Music in January, 2011, which is down 46 percent from the previous year. Pandora is now bigger on the Web, with an estimated 20.3 million monthly U.S. visitors.
Today, MySpace Music president Courtney Holt is stepping down. He joined two years ago from MTV. But with MySpace itself on the wane and Rupert Murdoch looking to unload it, MySpace Music can no longer hold its own. → Read More
Songtrust (founded in October, 2010) and Myspace Music this morning announced a partnership to bring Songtrust’s music publishing management services to the social network’s (vast) audience of DIY songwriters and bands.
A division of Downtown Music, Songtrust’s digital rights management solution empowers indie songwriters and artists to manage their music publishing and related rights. → Read More
GarageBand.com, the well-known indie music store, discovery & review service and online community, will be discontinued as of July 15th, 2010, more than 10 years after it first saw the light of day.
In an email sent to users this morning, the company that spawned social music discovery service iLike (now part of MySpace), the GarageBand team says users can register for an iLike account to have their music, profile pic and bio automatically linked up and ported over. → Read More
Dmitry Shapiro, the founder and CEO of shuttered video site Veoh, is joining MySpace Music today as Chief Technology Officer. Shapiro will report directly to Courtney Holt, President of MySpace Music.
In his new role, Shapiro will be “responsible for all aspects of technical developments for the MySpace Music platform”, including new versions of artist profiles and tools as well as the overall music experience on MySpace. Shapiro is known for founding Veoh, whose assets were recently sold to Israeli startup Qlipso. Veoh has had a troubled history, facing copyright litigation with Universal Music Group. While the startup Veoh won a summary judgement in its favor last year, the lawsuit proved to be too costly and distracting. Veoh was forced to file for filing for bankruptcy in February. → Read More
What single adjective best describes Navigaya? Gorgeous? Stylish? Addictive? Having spent a few weeks playing with it, I’d have to concede, all of the above.
There really is just no way around it, Navigaya is one of the most mesmerizing content products I’ve seen in a while. Just watch the video demo above for a taste, or better yet, be one of the 1000 TechCrunch Readers to gain exclusive access and judged for yourself. → Read More
The biggest U.S. music service on the Web in December was Vevo, a new entrant which is a joint venture between Google, Universal Music Group, and Sony Music. Dubbed the “Hulu of music videos,” Vevo attracted 35.4 million unique visitors in December, 2009, putting it above the 33.1 million visitors who went to MySpace Music, according to estimates put out today by comScore. Considering that Vevo only launched on December 8, that is a pretty good showing.
A closer look at the numbers shows, that nearly all of that audience came from YouTube, which hosts a Vevo channel. Of the 35.4 million visitors which comScore counts for Vevo, 32.6 million (or 92 percent) are attributed to YouTube. In one fell blow, YouTube has helped to push MySpace Music from the No. 1 spot. → Read More
Of all the things Google has launched this past year, the most useful may be its Music Onebox feature that allows you to easily play popular music from Google Search results. Following its debut in October, I found myself using it left and right for songs I wanted to listen to. One thing I noticed was that while deals were in place with iLike, imeem, Rhapsody, and Pandora, the majority of the one-click play results were from the streaming music service Lala. This was awesome because most of the songs served up by Lala were the full versions. But fast forward to today, and it’s a much different story: Lala Onebox results are few and far between.
Why? It’s hard to know for sure, but it seems pretty likely that Apple’s recent deal to purchase Lala is at play. At the very least, it would seem that behind-the-scenes politics are dictating the results now being shown. We noted at the time of the Apple/Lala deal that it could change the Onebox offering, and it looks like it has. Plenty of results that used to serve up a Lala play option now default to iLike, which itself is now a part of MySpace Music (as is imeem). In fact, doing a random sampling of 30 popular songs brought yielded 28 iLike Onebox results, and only 2 Lala results. The problem with this is that for the majority of iLike Onebox results, you can only listen to either 30 or 90 second clips, rather than the entire songs, like you could on Lala. That obviously makes Google Music Onebox music much less useful. → Read More
Online music services have had a bad few weeks. Imeem got bought by MySpace for next to nothing, Lala got bought by Apple for something ranging from a little to not-very-much. Spotify continues to be a no-show in the U.S. But at least one service, Pandora, appears to be doing quite well for itself.
The service has announced that it surpassed 40 million registered users earlier this month. That means the service had doubled its size in 2009. And it’s adding 600,000 new registered users a week now. Even more remarkable is that half of those new users are coming from mobile devices. And of those, the iPhone continues to lead the way with 10 million Pandora users of its own. That number has grown some 400% this year. → Read More
It’s been nearly a week since MySpace Music closed its acquisition of some of the assets of music service Imeem and redirected imeem.com to music.myspace.com. MySpace took a lot of heat for the sudden shutdown of the Imeem service, particularly the API.
But the fact is that MySpace didn’t shut the Imeem service down. Imeem’s creditors and the music labels did. If MySpace hadn’t done the deal Imeem would have shut down anyway. The company was just out of cash and options, and the wheels had come off the car. For the most part the press now gets that MySpace had very little to do with the shutdown, and has settled down.
Imeem’s 16 million monthly visitors apparently haven’t gotten the message, though, and every couple of minutes one of them fires off a frustrated message on Twitter. One example just a few minutes ago, in the image above: “Imeem, one of the best music sites, died, destroyed by MySpace.” Another: “RIP imeem, I will dearly miss you…All the more reason to hate myspace. They sold out on Dec. 8th.” Users are particularly upset about losing their playlists, something MySpace has said they’d work hard to transition “as quickly as possible.” → Read More
MySpace Music has completed its acquisition of most of the assets of music service iMeem.
We first broke the news that MySpace was close to acquiring iMeem last month. Two days later, we reported that an agreement was signed to purchase the assets of the company for $1 million in cash.
The deal didn’t close, however, because some of the assets MySpace Music was going to buy (namely, servers) were actually being leased. So that had to be worked out. And the final price ended up being less than $1 million, meaning MySpace Music is getting the iMeem brand and users for next to nothing. An additional earnout is also part of the deal, but it’s not much. → Read More
MOG may well be hitting a sweet spot with its All Access service, but it’s only available in the United States for now. Its most obvious competitor, MySpace Music, was too (apart from Australia and New Zealand) until a minute ago when the company made its official debut in the United Kingdom just over a year and two months after it was launched stateside.
Looks like the Telegraph’s sources were only a couple of months off, ultimately.
Anyway, MySpace users in the UK can now enjoy the same free, ad-supported service our American, Australian and Kiwi friends have had for a while: fully licensed audio and video content from major and indie artists that can be streamed on the social network for free, personalized music players and user & artist playlisting features, in addition to monetization opportunities and access to analytics and charts tools for all artists. → Read More
On Monday we broke the news that MySpace was in late stage negotiations to acquire music service iMeem. Those negotiations are now concluded, we’ve heard from multiple sources, and an agreement has been signed. MySpace will acquire most of the assets of iMeem for a purchase price of around $1 million in cash.
$1 million isn’t the “real” purchase price for the company. Some assets are being left behind, say our sources, including millions of dollars in accounts receivable plus some other cash. All or most of these assets, plus the purchase price, will be used to pay off some of the debt iMeem has accumulated.
About half of iMeem’s 55 employees will now work for MySpace. The rest, we’ve heard, will be looking for a new job.
One question that’s still unanswered – will the iMeem service live on? That’s completely up to the music labels, say our sources. iMeem’s deals with the labels terminate on this acquisition. The service is running at breakeven, we’ve heard, so MySpace may push to keep iMeem alive.
One thing is clear – MySpace is getting the iMeem assets for an absolute steal. I wouldn’t be surprised if other bidders suddenly get interested in iMeem and try to disrupt the deal before it actually closes. → Read More
MySpace is in late stage negotiations to acquire music streaming service iMeem, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. MySpace is on a bit of an acquisition spree – they acquired iLike, another music service, three months ago.
The iMeem acquisition isn’t yet finalized, we’ve heard from sources, and awaits approval from various stakeholders.
We don’t know the price of the acquisition, but this isn’t going to be a big win for investors. iMeem has raised at least $25 million (that we’ve been able to track) plus at least another $10 million in debt. But the difficultly in making a free streaming music service work as a business model forced them to make some hard decisions. Earlier this year they renegotiated label contracts and recapitalized the company, bringing in $6 million in fresh capital.
iMeem found a way to survive a few more months. But now they’re under the financial gun again, we’ve heard, and investors aren’t willing to put more capital into the company. But MySpace is stepping in to acquire the company. → Read More
A month ago we were criticizing MOG for over promising and under delivering with their new All Access music service. Our chief complaint was that the service wasn’t free, which was the original vision.
Today though, we reported that the odds are against Spotify launching for free in the U.S., and MySpace Music may move to a subscription model. Suddenly, MOG may be right in the thick of things, despite the fact that they will charge $5/month for the service.
So the timing was right today for MOG to release a first teaser video of All Access. This shows off just a part of the service – playlists. But from watching the video it’s clear that they are creating one heck of a user experience. Search looks to be extremely fast, with intelligent auto-complete. Adding songs from various places in the service is simple (compare to MySpace Music, which is still cumbersome after a year). And users can make the playlists private or public.
The social aspect of the service, including public and shareable playlists, is an advantage over Spotify. Spotify is mostly about you and your music, and you aren’t bothered with stuff from other people. But I like the idea of finding new playlists from friends, or that have been made popular by others. I also like that MOG is browser based and doesn’t require a download. I’ve been testing Spotify but only have it on one computer, so I can’t use it all the time. → Read More
TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid traveled down to Los Angeles earlier today to cover the launch of Google Music Onebox. In addition to his live notes from the event and the panel, he managed to point his camera at just about everyone involved in the new service: Google Director Product Management Search R.J. Pittman, MySpace Music President Courtney Holt and LaLa founder Bill Nguyen. Jason also recorded his own first demo of the product, which didn’t go so well based on the mouse and browser setup.
Key takeaways – Google will integrate new partners as it makes sense. And while MySpace knew about the negotiations between iLike and Google prior to announcing their acquisition of iLike in August, the deal was far from certain. More on that in a subsequent post.
All are below: → Read More
None of the companies involved will confirm the new Google Music service – we have “no comments” or absolute silence from Google, LaLa, MySpace and iLike. But the new service is all but confirmed. And we have the screenshots showing how the service, which will be announced on October 28, will look to prove it.
Matt Ghering, a product marketing manager at Google, has been one of the people talking to the big four music labels about the new service, we’ve heard from one of our sources. And he has supposedly sent these screenshots of the look and feel of Google Music search to various rights holders and potential partners.
The first screenshot shows how a search result might look on Google for a search for “U2.” A picture of the band is to the left of four streaming options for various songs, and the user has the option of listening via either iLike or LaLa. Click on one of the results, and a player pops up from the services that streams the song, along with an option to purchase the song for download. → Read More
When I came to write for TechCrunch, I never realized that I would get to write about my favorite band while I was growing up, so often. But I do once again today because Pearl Jam has an exclusive deal to premiere their new album on MySpace.
The album, Backspacer, will begin streaming live today on MySpace Music, a few days before it’s available in stores and online to purchase. This follows MySpace debuting the band’s first single off the new album, as well as a documentary, a few weeks ago. → Read More
MySpace may not be the leader in the social networking space anymore, but its free music streaming site, MySpace Music, has been growing fast. Which is why it’s not surprising that the social network is continuing to improve on this popular product. Today, it appears that MySpace Music has launched a new version of its homepage with UI redesign and several new features (we’ve confirmed with the company that that the redesign is new).
The new homepage is more visually appealing, with images of artists and bands front and center on the page and a sleek. modern interface. The site also features a “What’s Hot” section above the fold, which are the highest streamed arists’ and videos on the platform. Users can also create and share playlists on the homepage that are mixed in with artists’ playlists. → Read More
MySpace Music, which launched a little less than a year ago, is the one bright spot of growth in an otherwise flatlining MySpace.
But all that popularity comes at a price – billions of free streaming songs are costing MySpace up to $10 million a month in streaming fees, says a source, and the joint venture may lose $20 million or more this year.
To minimize those losses, MySpace has made a big change to its product – songs no longer auto-play when you visit a MySpace user profile. Autoplays accounted for a billion or more song streams per month, and were costing MySpace a significant amount of money. Turning off that hose is a cost saving maneuver. This also has the benefit, sources say, of improving the user experience and providing labels with better listening data.
Personally, I’ve always disliked the autoplay feature on MySpace, although execs there tended to defend it as one of the distinguishing features of the service. Users can still opt-in to autoplay songs. → Read More
As more details emerge about the MySpace-iLike acquisition, all sorts of interesting observations and questions pop up. A few thoughts:
The Facebook Angle
This is by far the most interesting angle to the deal. iLike is the most popular music application on Facebook, and is the de facto Facebook Music app. That company will shortly be owned by MySpace, Facebook’s primary competitor. That puts Facebook in a lose-lose situation. They can let iLike continue to dominate the music scene on Facebook and let MySpace own all that. Or they can ban iLike and lose all credibility with their platform – everyone would know iLike was banned because of the acquisition by MySpace. And it doesn’t have to be an outright ban. Facebook has plenty of subtle ways of trainwrecking an application they don’t like. Keep an eye on this.
Why didn’t Facebook just buy iLike? A matching or slightly better offer than the $20 million MySpace is paying would likely have gotten the deal done. And it may have saved Facebook from an embarrassing situation.
If I were MySpace, I’d focus on getting their free streaming music into the iLike Facebook application as soon as possible. Advertisers will love it. → Read More
