The Hollywood Reporter
News Corp.’s MySpace unveiled its first acquisition under CEO Owen Van Natta on Wednesday, saying it will buy iLike, the firm behind the top music application across social networks, including competitor Facebook. Van Natta announced the deal in a conference call with reporters, saying he wants to take the iLike approach to areas beyond music. He particularly mentioned entertainment, video and games as key focus areas for MySpace, in which iLike could develop future applications. Asked by The Hollywood Reporter about possible film apps, Van Natta said: “Film is an important part of MySpace…It is one of the areas that’s a potential.” Blog reports in recent days have buzzed about a potential deal for iLike. While the companies didn’t disclose the purchase price Wednesday, reports have put it at anywhere between $13.5 million and $20 million.
WASHINGTON FILM WORKS NOW HAS A FACEBOOK PAGE
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Poke away.
ILIKE EXPANDS SOCIAL MUSIC SERVICE TO NEW PLATFORMS
billboard.biz
iLike is expanding its social music service to new platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, and MySpace, as well as introducing a new data feature for artists who use it to promote their music. Hoping to address the problem many artists have with updating multiple social networking services with new information and content, iLike is now syndicating changes to artists’ profiles on these other services. Artists can now link their iLike and Twitter accounts so they can simply Tweet once and have it appear on Twitter, Facebook and iLike profile. And when new music, videos or concert listings are added to the artists’ iLike page, an alert will go out of the change on Twitter. Integration with YouTube is similar. If a new video is added to iLike, that same video will appear on the artists’ YouTube page. Concert listing will be updated on MySpace pages, and artist can add music to their Facebook profiles.
