MySpace confirmed on Wednesday its purchase of the social music recommendation service iLike. Although the terms of business deal have not been formally publicized, iLike is worth an estimated £12.1 m.
ILike is a social music recommendation service which allows users to not only listen to music, but also have music recommended to them based on their previous music preferences. MySpace intend to capitalize the recommendation engine within iLike by also recommending new games and videos to its users as well as music. ILike has been very successful in recent years and has become the top music application on facebook, Bebo and a variety of other social networking sites. At present 80% of all traffic to iLike comes from Facebook; Facebook being the main rivals for MySpace in the social media world.
The purchase of iLike is a step closer to the MySpace aim of trying to become not just a social networking site, but an entertainment portal by focusing on categories such as music. Owen Van Natta, chief executive officer of MySpace explained to the Financial Times that MySpace intends to “restructure the MySpace business, refocus the product and company strategy.” The changes are clearly necessary due to the substantial decreases in active users on MySpace which have continued to fall by 25% between June 2008 and June 2009.
Through purchasing ilike, MySpace gain instant “real estate” on Facebook as 31 million of the 50 million registered users of iLike has the app installed on their facebook page; it will be interesting to see if Facebook accept the intrusion. Facebook may choose to drop the application even though it would most definitely cause a substantial up roar from the many users who have installed ilike on their Facebook pages. However, Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker explains how this is very unlikely to happen unless MySpace decide to change the iLike application in some way.