Rupert Murdoch’s social media giant MySpace has agreed to acquire iLike, a social music discovery site, in an acquisition whose terms were not disclosed.
ILike was founded in 2006 and has since grown to having 55 million total users and 1.5 billion monthly impressions.
“Combining MySpace’s existing platform, reach and resources with iLike’s syndication network and social discovery tools creates the potential for truly exciting innovation and commerce across any vertical entertainment category — our combined assets now span all the major social networks,” said Hadi Partovi, president of iLike in a statement.
This acquisition will give MySpace control of two of the top social networking properties for music –MySpace music and iLike –competing with sites including Imeem.com and Facebook’s music applications. This move will bring them more eyeballs in the social music space online. “MySpace has tried to differentiate them self as the entertainment social space and this acquisition follows that,” said Sonal Gandhi, analyst at Forrester Research.
Interestingly, iLike is one of Facebook’s biggest music applications.
“The big question is how the relationship with Facebook could change,” said Sonal Gandhi, analyst at Forrester Research. “MySpace might keep the same iLike Facebook relationship or they might take iLike off of Facebook, in which case Facebook would probably promote a different music app. It remains to be seen.”
There are no changes planned for the iLike user experience and iLike will remain headquartered in Seattle. iLike will continue to be run by Ali Partovi, the current CEO, president Hadi Partovi and CTO Nat Brown.
