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… → 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
The number of visitors to MySpace UK has halved in the last six months, TechCrunch Europe has learned, leading to a fresh round of layoffs at the London office of the social networking site.
According to internal figures that we’ve seen, monthly visits to MySpace UK are down from a peak of just under 10 million at the start of the year to around 5m as of the end of June 2010. If indeed this is… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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)… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → Read More
MySpace is close to acquiring popular social music service iLike, we’ve confirmed with multiple sources. The deal, which should close this week, will be MySpace’s first acquisition since new CEO Owen Van Natta took control of the company in April 2009. The price is “around $20 million.”
iLike, which launched in late 2006, is a social music recommendation service that now has more than 50 million… → Read More
When Heath Ledger passed away in January 2008, he had no shortage of things he was working on. Just about everyone in the world, it seems, saw The Dark Knight, but he had smaller projects too. One of those was directing a music video for the band Modest Mouse, for their song “King Rat.” Today, that video debuts on MySpace Music.
The video, which is animated, is meant be a statement against modern… → Read More
MySpace may not be the hottest thing in social networking any longer, with visitor numbers and page views decreasing at an alarming rate, but apparently its free music streaming service MySpace Music is still something of a hit.
According to Nielsen data (PDF) for June 2009, traffic to MySpace’s music subdomain has grown 190% since its launch in September 2008 and year-over-year traffic to the… → Read More
One thing is for certain – the six month old MySpace Music project is throwing off a lot of cash to the labels. That’s because MySpace’s 75 million or so U.S. users are streaming literally billions of songs a month. And they have to pay for every song streamed.
Labels are known to give streaming rates for on demand music of around half a cent per song play, but they are negotiated on a deal by… → Read More
MySpace Music, the joint venture between MySpace and the major labels to provide free streaming music to users, is announcing its executive team this afternoon. The president of the company, Courtney Holt, was announced late last year. Today the company showing off the rest of the team.
The key new executives are Jamie Kantrowitz (SVP Strategy and Global Marketing), Alex Maghen (CTO), Nancy… → Read More
Over the last few weeks MySpace Music has quietly rolled out a number of new features that should make the service significantly more appealing to consumers. While MySpace Music kicked off to an fairly impressive start when it launched last September, seeing a huge amount of traffic and streamed songs, even its President Courtney Holt has conceded that it wasn’t very user-friendly and didn’t… → Read More
There’s something wrong with CBS Radio’s press release announcing the launch, complete with silly “countdown,” of 92.3 Now FM in New York City, a contemporary hit radio station that will replace K-Rock on Wednesday, March 11, at 5:00pm. (Contemporary hit radio, in plain English, means garbage pop songs, distinguished by their use of auto-tune and use of lowest-common-denominator song-writing.)… → Read More
I’m not sure if this was moved up in response to leaked copiess of U2′s newest album, No Line On The Horizon spreading across the Internet, but the entire the album will be streamed for free at MySpace Music. The player in U2′s MySpace Music page features a single, but if you click on the top album in the sidebar, you can hear the entire thing. MySpace says that the entire album will be… → Read More
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Berlin, Germany
San Francisco
