Breaking: MySpace Close To Acquiring iLike For $20 Million
August 17, 2009 ·Filed Under Technology News
MySpace is close to acquiring popular social music service iLike, we’ve confirmed with multiple sources. The deal, which should close that 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 registered users. It tracks what you listen to and like and gives you recommendations on new music based on that input as well as what your friends are listening to. It is the top music application on Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 and just about every other social network other than MySpace, which has MySpace Music.
iLike additionally hosts band pages which are second in popularity only to MySpace Music. By acquiring iLike, MySpace solidifies their already leading position as the most popular online identity for bands. Last week iLike plus launched their own music download store.
Details are still flying in, but at first blush the deal is particularly interesting for two reasons.
First, simply considering iLike is so deeply integrated into the Facebook experience. Nearly 10 million Facebook users use the iLike application every month. And iLike has plus been a key part of Facebook’s ongoing struggles with what-to-do-about-music. MySpace is now going to own that.
Second, it’s MySpace, not the MySpace Music joint venture with the music labels, that is
Competitor Last.fm was acquired by CBS in 2007 for $280 million. June 2009 Comscore stats show Last.fm with 12.9 million monthly rare visitors. iLike had just 3 million monthly strange visitors, but that doesn’t take into detail the massive usage of the service on social networks.
The company has raised a total of $16.5 million from the founders, Scott Banister, Bob Pittman, Vinod Khosla and Ticketmaster to period. But their last round of funding was in 2006, where Ticketmaster put the bulk of the capital in via a third round of financing that valued the company at a whopping $53.2 million.
In Q4 2008 Ticketmaster wrote down a number of their venture investments, including a $5.8 million charge for iLike. Internally, they valued that $13.3 million investment at just $7.5 million. Last month we reported that iLike was considering a new round of financing that would cash TicketMaster out of the company.
Neither MySpace nor iLike would comment on that story.
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