MySpace’s parent company is reportedly in the process of trying to raise $50 million to transform the once booming web destination into a music streaming service that would directly compete with Pandora and Spotify. The rumor comes courtesy of some leaked documents that were recently obtained by Business Insider.
The plan appears to be to launch the music streaming service sometime in the second quarter of 2013. They believe they have an advantage over the competition because they pay a lower rate to labels for music. There are roughly 27 million songs on MySpace now that don’t belong to a major record label which is about half of all the music played on the site.
Documents reveal that MySpace wants to use $10 million to put towards marketing efforts and $15-25 million for licensing deals signed with record labels while another $15-25 million will be utilized as working capital.
MySpace has been one of the most interesting case studies, if you can call it than, in the history of the Internet. The precursor to Facebook launched in August 2003 and just two years later, the service was sold to News Corporation for $580 million.
Since then the site has seen a steady drop in traffic which prompted News Corp. to sell the property for just $35 million last summer to Specific Media. The new owners have put a lot of time and effort into the site which shows: traffic is up 36 percent since December 2011 and revenue is expected to increase to $15 million this year. Last year, the site brought in only $9 million.
