MySpace has agreed to acquire social music discovery service iLike, as it tries to remake itself as an entertainment portal. The acquisition is expected to bring together the two companies which share a common vision revolving around social discovery and content distribution.
Owen Van Natta, chief executive officer of MySpace, said: “The iLike acquisition advances our relentless pursuit of innovation and the need to create new distributed social experiences in music and beyond. We are deeply committed to bringing world class talent into all areas of the company and this acquisition demonstrates our focus on this objective.”
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person familiar with the situation as saying, that the deal is valued around $20m.
iLike, started by brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi in 2006, allows people to share music recommendations, playlists and personalized content alerts. It is popular on social networking sites such as Facebook, Orkut, hi5 platforms. iLike offers musicians and labels an artist dashboard from which to reach fans and manage their presence across multiple channels. It also runs indie music site GarageBand.com.
iLike said that its users and the artist community should expect the iLike experience to be unaffected by the acquisition. The entire iLike team will stay intact, including, CEO Ali Partovi, president Hadi Partovi and CTO Nat Brown. iLike has around 55 million users, and will remain headquartered in Seattle.
Before starting iLike, Ali Partovi founded and sold LinkExchange to Microsoft and Hadi Partovi independently co-founded and sold TellMe Networks, also to Microsoft. Hadi Partovi also incubated Start.com (now Live.com). Brown was an early architect at Microsoft, and was involved in the creation the first Xbox, .NET/CLR, and ActiveX/COM/OLE.
Hadi Partovi, president of iLike, said: “MySpace’s strengths have been a long-time source of inspiration for iLike. Combining MySpace’s existing platform, reach and resources with iLike’s syndication network and social discovery tools create the potential for truly exciting innovation and commerce across any vertical entertainment category – our combined assets now span all the major social networks.”
