NewsCorp Begins MySpace Auction Wednesday
It feels like a race to the bottom, but at least the action has finally begun. After months of publicly bashing MySpace, parent NewsCorp is reportedly beginning the sale process in ernest on Wednesday. And, not surprisingly after months of tire kicking, there's no one bidder in the lead.
Vevo, Providence Equity Partners and Silver Lake Partner have all had preliminary discussions according to AllThingsDigital, but no formal offers have been made. Facebook, Google and Zynga are reportedly not on the list of interested buyers.
Several sources still privately claim that MySpace has a viable turnaround plan. Perhaps they'll let any investors know soon what those plans are.
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Thats exactly what the Music Indsutry does NOT need – Wall Street private equity firms getting involved….
That’s because Facebook, Google and Zynga are too smart to bid on a dying brand. It’s so last decade 😉
I’ve got £1. Nine more people fancy chipping in and we have probably paid over the odds, but hey, I also have a 15 year old coder who could sort it out in a month so probably money well spent.
If I owned MySpace…I would:
1. Turn it into a huge indie music licensing company with special technology for search and discover.
2. I would position it to compete with Pandora, becoming the indie counterpart (with some editorial guidelines for content to control quality).
3. I would also position it to compete with OurStage.
Obviously, the general idea is to make it serve musicians and artists. In the gold rush, the ones that really made money sold shovels and stuff. In this new music era, if you can sell “shovels” well, I think you have a winning business. Anybody wanna hire me? lol 🙂
jake, funny you say that.
almost anything run by bankers/vc has been trouble. from emi to wmg to topspin to lala… all not profitable and just want quick exit and sell off.
Well, I don’t care much who the buyer will be. Their next site redesign will be make or break.
Myspace has the one advantage of being SEO and allowing posted music to show up quickly in searches….once facebook can start offering this service myspace is officially brain dead
I don’t know why Facebook hasn’t put embedded first-party streaming of music onto music artist pages yet… Once that happens Myspace will have very little purpose.
Paige, Facebook already has that feature. Myself and many others put our music photos and sounds, as well as some videos (If you own them)
To compete-is the key statement. All last year you could see the signs of things to come. Last year when they launched their music business-they opted to pull in the Majors and their celeb talents, but found out how difficult licensing that music is. Myspacers were offended that myspace wanted music from the majors. The struggle began, where…with leadership. The ship has run aground