MySpace May Be After Flixster

Over the past several months, MySpace has become much more formidable thanks to some new features, a deal with a record label, and a couple of acquisitions.  It looks like the growth spurt may not be over, either, as a report's indicated that MySpace is now interested in getting to know Flixster.

Flixster is a sort of social networking site organized around movies.  It's not as popular as Amazon's IMDB, but could prove valuable because, according to Compete, it pulls in more unique visitors than News Corp.'s Rotten Tomatoes (3.4 million versus 2.2 million in November, for example).

As for what MySpace might do with Flixster, Kara Swisher wrote, "Whether this is an acquisition or more of a larger partnership deal with News Corp. digital entertainment sites is unclear.  Several sources said a purchase was a possibility, while others talked about a more complex deal that did not necessarily mean a purchase."

Neither relationship is hard to imagine.  Would-be users can already register on Flixster with a MySpace account, proving that the two can coexist.  But MySpace has bought iLike and Imeem in recent days, demonstrating that it likes to own things outright.

We'll keep an eye on the situation.  Just don't count on any deals getting sealed in the immediate future since things tend to wind down in December.

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> MySpace Upgrades Users' Mobile Experience

> MySpace Music Launches In The UK

> MySpace Reaches Deal With Another Music Label

MySpace Buys imeem, Rolls it Into MySpace Music

MySpace announced today that it has completed a deal to acquire "certain assets" of the popular social media music service imeem. imeem is now redirecting to MySpace Music.

"MySpace Music and imeem share a common vision and commitment to further enabling the socialization of content across the Web," says MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta. "This deal will allow us to leverage imeem’s industry leading technology and over time, meaningfully integrate their products into the MySpace Music experience."

"Since its inception in 2003, imeem has built a highly engaged music community of more than 16 million users worldwide," says Van Natta. "imeem helped pioneer the ad-supported digital music model and created the Web’s first embeddable music and video playlists enabling users to embed songs and playlists virtually anywhere on the Web, including MySpace."

MySpace will be taking on imeem CEO Dalton Caldwell, CTO Brian Berg, COO Ali Aydar and VP of Sales David Wade as consultants to help manage the transition. Financial terms were not made available in the announcement. Mike Arrington says it's less than $1 million.

MySpace says that in the coming weeks, they will be working as quickly as possible to take aspects of imeem and migrate them to MySpace Music. The company says they'll be working to offer users the imeem playlists they created.
 

Have You Read This?

> MySpace Music Launches In The UK

> MySpace Reaches Deal With Another Music Label

> MySpace Launches New Music Charts

MySpace Music Launches In The UK

MySpace is continuing to make big strides on the music front.  Or more accurately, the social network has made a huge, across-the-Atlantic leap, as late yesterday, MySpace Music launched in the UK.

A MySpace representative explained in an email to WebProNews, "With this launch, MySpace Music brings to the UK all of the functionality currently available to U.S., Australian and Kiwi based users including an ever-growing catalogue of fully licensed audio and video content from both Major and Indie artists, user-friendly e-commerce solutions, personal music players and user and artist playlisting, in addition to monetization opportunities and access to comprehensive analytics and charts tools for all artists."

MySpace Music

MySpace Today Trailers | MySpace Video

All in all, it's something for people on every side of the equation to get excited about.

Artists including Alicia Keys, 50 Cent, Florence & the Machine, Kasabian, and Nelly Furtado are providing videos and playlists.  Other interesting entities, including the Vatican and Katie Price, have also contributed.  This, in turn, should give users a lot of fun stuff to play with.  (Side note: the Vatican has great taste, endorsing both Muse and Mozart.)

And this an important moment for MySpace, too, of course.  Launching a product in a new market isn't something that's done lightly, and since MySpace did so where Facebook is especially dominant (Hitwise estimated that Facebook received one-seventh of all UK page views in September), a lot may be riding on MySpace Music.

Have You Read This?

> MySpace Reaches Deal With Another Music Label

> MySpace Picks Up Imeem

> MySpace Launches New Music Charts

MySpace Reaches Deal With Another Music Label

The "virtual fifth label" is now friends with MySpace.  Merlin, an organization that represents independent music companies, is supposed to have signed a deal with the social network that should nicely complement MySpace's existing partnerships with EMI, Sony, Universal, and Warner. Merlin's association with indie artists and late arrival to the music scene (it launched in January of 2007) set it apart from the so-called Big Four.  Just the same, Merlin's a major force, with members in more than 25 countries, and names like Cat Power, Tom Waits, and The White Stripes linked with it. So it's quite noteworthy that, according to Andrew Orlowski, a Merlin spokesman stated, "After more than a year of negotiations, MySpace Music has finally offered Merlin a deal that is acceptable to its members, members who represent 10% of the global music market." What's more, "The same eligibility and level of participation will be offered to all independent labels licensing content to MySpace Music." Of course, the details of the arrangement haven't yet been made public, which leaves a lot of questions unanswered.  But it looks like MySpace, which acquired Imeem just yesterday and launched MySpace Music Charts the day before, is really on a roll on the music front.

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