MySpace Music Wants Money

MySpace Music is in trouble. The service is not making money like it used to and that, even at the best of times, was not much. MySpace owners News Corp appear to have finally thrown in the towel on the issue of advertising revenue supporting the music service.

Chairman of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, has always been critical of free online services. He appears to have got his way with Hulu (which he also owns) and now it seems that the tottering MySpace will be subjected to that will as well. The problem here is that what works (subjective) for Hulu may not work at all for MySpace.

The social networking site has been steadily hemorrhaging users ever since Facebook showed up. A telling factor is that before Facebook became big, Google entered into an advertising deal with MySpace. The value? $900 million. Now Google isn’t even bothering to renew the deal for a lesser price. Finding a replacement is going to be hard and definitely will not be found at that value. This is worrying because in the last five years, running MySpace has cost News Corp $500 million. So it’s little wonder that they are trying to scrape any sort of revenue from wherever they can.

At the heart of the matter is the issue of losing that all important demographic of 18-35 year olds. With no real prospect of them coming back and with rumors about Google Me ever increasing, it maybe that MySpace will have to go the way of GeoCities.

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