MySpace May Acquire Social Music Site iLike: Report

MySpace may be close to acquiring social music service iLike in a potential deal worth about $20 million.

The possible acquisition, first reported by TechCrunch, would be the first MySpace acquisition since its new CEO Owen Van Natta took over in April.

iLike is a Web-based social music discovery service, and claims to be the dominant music application on several social networking platforms, including Facebook, Orkut, hi5 and Bebo. However, MySpace currently offers its own service, MySpace Music, TechCrunch reported.

iLike claims to have more than 50 million registered users who use the company's technology to share music recommendations, play lists and personalized concert alerts. It offers the iLike Sidebar for iTunes and Windows Media Player to suggest new music, create automatic play lists and connect users.

The company also offers Universal Artist Dashboard, a portal that musicians and labels can use to reach out to fans and manage their presence across such channels as Facebook, Orkut, hi5, Bebo, iLike.com, Ask.com, iLike Sidebar plugins and iLike's iPhone application.

It also runs indie music site GarageBand.com.

Major artists who have recently posted exclusive video content on iLike for syndication across the Web include Bono, Jason Mraz, Keith Urban, Linkin Park and R.E.M., according to iLike.

According to TechCrunch, about 10 million Facebook users use iLike every month.

iLike's primary investor is Ticketmaster. At the time of iLike's third round of venture capital funding in 2006, which was led by Ticketmaster, iLike was valued at about $53.2 million. However, Ticketmaster late last year took a $5.8 million charge for iLike, TechCrunch reported.

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