The Social

LOS ANGELES--Already the far-and-away leader in search, Google wants to be a big player in music discovery, too.

The pop-up MySpace player that will appear when clicking the 'play' button in a Google search.

(Credit: MySpace)

The search giant teamed up with News Corp.'s MySpace and streaming service Lala for the Wednesday debut of the new Google music search feature at the historic Capitol Records building in Hollywood. With the new music search, which had been internally code-named "OneBox" when news of the project broke earlier this month, search queries pertaining to something like a song, artist, lyrics, or album will bring up links to streaming songs from iLike and MySpace, as well as links to artist information on Pandora, Imeem, and Rhapsody. The lyrics search is provided through a partnership with Gracenote.

"It is directly embedded and integrated into Google search. There's no special button to push," R.J. Pittman, director of product management for search properties, said in a phone interview with CNET News. Currently, due to licensing and availability issues, the music search is U.S.-only.

There also won't be direct download links in Google: those will be handled through Lala and MySpace. "We push all the music engagement and commerce down through the partners," Pittman said.

Additionally, if a relevant music video is available, the MySpace window that pops up when someone clicks on the "play" button in search results will display a link to that video through MySpace's new music video portal. That's interesting, considering music videos are some of the most popular content on Google's own YouTube--but YouTube video results will continue to show up independently of the new music results in Google searches.

Financial terms of the partnerships aren't yet clear. "Everyone's keeping their own revenues and we're not messing with anything," Lala founder and Chairman Bill Nguyen told CNET News. But MySpace Music President Courtney Holt was a bit more tight-lipped, saying "we're not discussing the financial details."

The MySpace deal is a little more complicated to begin with, though. Google had been in talks with music start-up iLike about integration into music search, but then iLike was acquired by MySpace in a deal that closed earlier this month. Indeed, a statement from Holt says that "this relationship was secured and implemented by the iLike team." But iLike founder Ali Partovi (who's currently on board MySpace's music team) explained that the partnership now has "MySpace branding, (and) MySpace content licensing." Through the integration of iLike's technology, it'll also have concert notifications if someone searches on Google for a band that's currently on tour.

"I think MySpace, along with (Apple's) iPod, is one of the most trusted brands in music, one of the most resonant to consumers," Partovi said. MySpace is also reported to be in talks with Microsoft to power a music feature on MSN.

Music search is something that Google could really dominate. According to traffic firm Experian Hitwise, 6 percent of Google's top 1,000 search-related terms deal with music, and already 30 percent of traffic to sites that Hitwise classifies under the "music" umbrella comes from Google.

Considering Google's reach, it's a big win for both MySpace, currently struggling to redefine itself as a pop culture powerhouse rather than a social network through its MySpace Music service, a joint venture with major and independent record labels, and Lala, which also has a new song-gifting deal with Facebook. "We think (Google's music search) going to have a thousand percent increase in our sales, an order of magnitude more," Lala's Nguyen told CNET News.

This also means that music-related search results are getting a sheen of legitimacy on Google. With official partnerships, Google's most prominent music search results will be from sites that have licensing deals in place with the major labels, rather than potentially pirated content. Google's history with the music industry is spotty at best: it's had to strike its own deals with the major record labels, and relations haven't always been positive. Music search puts it all into order, partners in the deal say.

"Instead of ending up with a pirate site and a page with a bunch of ads or random lyrics sites, you wind up with a play button," Nguyen said.

Updated 4:30 p.m. Just after Google and Lala made the announcement official (in what was probably not a coincidence) Yahoo released a blog post designed to point out that they've been offering this kind of music search for a while. "We've made it easier to find music videos, artist information, and play full length songs from within the search results page. This is just one of the many ways Yahoo! is enhancing the search experience for music lovers," said Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer products for Yahoo Search.

SAN FRANCISCO--With both MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta and News Corp. chief digital officer Jonathan Miller taking the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit this week, there was naturally plenty of talk about the social site's attempt to reverse its ill fortune of late. Once the biggest name in social networking, it's long since lost that title to Facebook and is trying to reinvent itself as a destination for music and entertainment.

"I think that what you see in the space more than anything else is if you don't keep innovating and moving forward you get in trouble," Miller said in his talk on Thursday morning. "You can't stop, you have to keep going, and (MySpace) didn't keep going, it kind of stopped."

And in that time, he added, "we had two fantastic competitors emerge in Facebook and Twitter."

The previous day, Van Natta made his first big appearance on the conference circuit since he joined MySpace and was tasked with a major turnaround. Van Natta unveiled a new music video hub as well as an enhanced set of marketing tools for music artists--some of which were built in with technology from iLike, which MySpace acquired this summer.

And on Wednesday night, the "new" MySpace was out in full form: a line snaked down three city blocks when music fans caught wind of the fact that the company had booked rock band Weezer for one of its "secret shows" concerts.

"MySpace started with an essence around certain things, and one of them was music, and meeting new people," Miller, a former AOL exec who also joined News Corp. this spring, said on Thursday. "We're going back to basics in that sense, but you've got to make it relevant to today and going forward."

It's obviously too early to tell whether the "reinvention" will work. Some critics say that it's too big of a task, especially given the state of the advertising market. But Miller spent a big portion of his talk at the Web 2.0 Summit hyping up the Fox Audience Network, or FAN, the digital advertising division that News Corp. first announced last spring.

"We kind of broke it out of MySpace and gave it a life of its own," Miller said. "We're just at the beginning of a coming-out party for FAN."

FAN just inked a deal with agency giant Omnicom, and more are on the way, he added. Miller also said FAN is the fifth-largest ad network on the Web, after the usual suspects--Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL--and that it's hoping to get into fourth place soon.

SAN FRANCISCO--He's not kidding about making changes.

MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta took the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit event on Wednesday and paraded out a whole slew of announcements related to turning the flagging social network into a music and media powerhouse. He showed off a massive catalog of music videos--coming from all the partners in the MySpace Music joint venture--and an enhanced set of tools for bands using the site as a marketing and promotional hub. Plus, the MySpace Music service now syncs up with Apple's iTunes, not just Amazon MP3.

It was former Facebook exec Van Natta's first big public appearance since becoming CEO of the News Corp.-owned MySpace in April.

The "artist dashboard" for MySpace Music is a free product that offers a suite of analytics for bands and artists that operate MySpace profiles so that they can get details on who's listening and interacting with them within the MySpace community. It's also baked in features from iLike, the music service that MySpace acquired this summer. iLike operates social apps on a variety of platforms, including Facebook, and artists using MySpace can now access that data too.

"We're giving people things like geographic breakdowns, where exactly their friends are not just in the U.S. but in the world," Van Natta explained. "This is literally getting pushed live as I'm sitting here talking to you."

For the fans, there's the music video portal, which started rolling out on Wednesday, offering the entire catalog of music videos from all the labels that offer their music on the MySpace Music streaming service. It'll compete with Vevo, the Universal Music Group-founded music video hub that features YouTube-created technology and investment backing from Abu Dhabi oil money. But it sounds like Universal's music videos will be on MySpace, too.

CNET News reported earlier this month that MySpace was working with video hub Hulu--in which News Corp. is a stakeholder--to launch a new video service. It's unclear whether there is any connection to the new music video hub.

MySpace launched the MySpace Music operation last year and hired former MTV executive Courtney Holt to head it up. But things haven't been altogether sunny. Earlier this year, word got out that the major labels who've put a stake in MySpace Music were dissatisfied with its performance.

Plus, earlier on Wednesday, it came to light that rival Facebook was making its first big move in the music space. The massive social network announced a partnership with music service Lala as part of its revamped virtual gifts marketplace, allowing members to buy songs for one another.

Van Natta shrugged off concerns that MySpace, with a significant portion of its traffic eaten away by Facebook's rocketing growth, is having trouble pulling in advertising revenues.

"We're really good at monetization," he assured the audience. "There's a lot of different avenues that we can take."

This post was expanded at 4:54 p.m. PT.

Hot on the heels of its appointment of a chief technology officer last week, News Corp.'s MySpace on Monday announced that Mark Rosenbaum has been hired as its chief financial officer.

Although the appointment marks the first time that the social network has had a CFO, it is Rosenbaum's second stint at News Corp. He headed up financial operations at Gemstar-TV Guide International, when it was owned by the Rupert Murdoch-helmed conglomerate. More recently, Rosenbaum served as a consultant to MGM.

Mark Rosenbaum's MySpace profile picture.

(Credit: MySpace)

In his new position, Rosenbaum report directly to Owen Van Natta, the former Facebook executive who became MySpace's CEO in April, after the departure of co-founder Chris DeWolfe.

Less than two months after Van Natta's hiring, MySpace announced a layoff of nearly 30 percent amid stagnant growth and what was increasingly a losing battle against Facebook in its quest for social-networking dominance. The company called its aim at financial efficiency a "return to start-up culture."

Hiring a chief financial officer is, as a result, a logical step.

"Having led companies at every stage of their development, Mark understands both start-up culture and mature businesses, and is well-suited to guide MySpace's financial organization through its next phase of growth," Van Natta said in a release announcing Rosenbaum's hire. "We're thrilled to add someone with his pedigree and experience to the team."

In a move that makes him seem a bit like Dr. Evil wanting to be paid one hundred billion dollars for Austin Powers' ransom, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has said that he will charge for all the online content associated with the newspapers and television stations he owns.

Rupert Murdoch, media baron

(Credit: Dan Farber/CBS Interactive)

It's a goal that some in the digital-media space will bill as ludicrous--and some as inevitable.

The Financial Times reported the news Thursday, adding that Murdoch had spotted "some good signs of life" in the battered advertising sector.

He's already got most of The Wall Street Journal, which News Corp. acquired two years ago, behind a pay wall. But he also owns the rest of Dow Jones & Company, the Fox television and film empire, the New York Post, and the U.K.'s The Times. News Corp. is also a partner in Hulu, the joint video venture that offers a big chunk of Fox television content (as well as NBC and ABC) for free on the Web.

Robert Iger, the CEO of new Hulu partner Disney, said at a conference last month that he does not believe Web content needs to be offered for free, and that consumers will be willing to pay for it.

"We intend to charge for all our news Web sites," Murdoch said, according to the Financial Times. "If we're successful, we'll be followed by all media."

In late 2007, well before the market collapse last fall, Murdoch had said pretty much the exact opposite, claiming that a free and ad-supported model would be more beneficial than a subscription model for The Wall Street Journal.

Presumably the new paid-content strategy wouldn't apply to News Corp.'s digital-only assets, like social network MySpace.

(Credit: MySpace)

MySpace unveiled its new messaging system late on Thursday night--which now lets members use the formerly internal service to e-mail others from an @myspace.com account--and the reactions have been pretty positive. Since it's slowing rolling out in beta over the next few weeks, hands-on reviews are hard to come by, but the design looks pretty good and people seem to agree that it may help reverse some of the site's well-publicized traffic stagnation.

Here are the numbers: MySpace says that nearly a fifth of its traffic is related to the messaging platform, and it has 130 million users worldwide. MySpace Mail can therefore enter the market as the fourth largest e-mail provider in the world and the second biggest in the U.S. It also gives the News Corp.-owned social network a leg up on Facebook, which has eclipsed it in traffic but still has a pretty rudimentary messaging system. (That's apparently going to change, from what everyone's been saying.)

MySpace Mail, in tune with its media-savvy young audience, has made it easier than other e-mail clients to attach music, video, and picture files. Additionally, if you're contacting another MySpace member, an activity feed of that member's recent MySpace goings-on will appear in the right sidebar. Those are features that I wouldn't be surprised to see other e-mail clients start integrating in the future.

But will MySpace Mail shake up the industry? I don't think so.

The question for MySpace is uptake. The majority of its users likely already have other e-mail addresses that they already use, and switching over may be a complicated matter: the hassle of changing address books, not to mention updating e-mail list and account subscriptions, means that people just don't change their addresses very often. And it doesn't have the invite-only allure or the power of a name like Google behind it that Gmail had when it launched in 2004.

Security's also an issue, given how well-publicized MySpace spam and worms have been over the years. The company says it is using "leading anti-spam technology and virus scanning" in the overhauled messaging client.

So, according to PaidContent, MySpace is about to upgrade its messaging service to full-out Web mail: so that instead of only being able to communicate with other MySpace members, users will have an @myspace.com e-mail address. This will start rolling out on Thursday, apparently, with the new service available to all MySpace members by the end of the year.

This seems a little odd at first, considering we recently heard that the troubled MySpace was more or less giving up on trying to compete with Facebook, and was attempting to rebrand as an "entertainment portal." Launching a new tech-related product doesn't seem to fit into that, unless you consider that (according to PaidContent) this has been in development since before the management shakeup that saw Owen Van Natta replacing Chris DeWolfe as MySpace CEO, and brought in former AOL exec Jon Miller as the head of parent company News Corp.'s digital operations.

But here's a thought: I wonder how much the focus of "MySpace Mail" will be geared toward bands and artists who want a better way to manage and communicate with their fan bases. Enhanced messaging could make it possible for music acts, who were what made MySpace popular in the first place and are undoubtedly a big part of its new entertainment-centric strategy, to use MySpace to communicate with fans who might not be using MySpace.

For ordinary users, meanwhile, e-mail addresses could help pull the MySpace brand off its domain and give it more reach--much like the MySpace ID universal log-in product, which hasn't really rolled out yet (and which may have had large-scale success quashed by the ubiquity of Facebook Connect). And while revamping its messaging system might not bring in many new users for MySpace, it could help stall potential attrition.

MySpace has allowed its users to reserve "vanity URLs" for their profiles for years now--something that Facebook only started doing this summer.

NEW YORK--"The music business discovered data only to show how bad it was getting," MySpace Music President Courtney Holt said in a talk on Tuesday morning. "The first time I was asked to get data when I was working at Universal (Music Group) was, 'How many songs are being stolen?'"

Holt was speaking at an event called the New Music Seminar, a day-long conference geared toward the artist side of the record business. The angle of the event was dealing with a paradox that has emerged in the past decade: the Internet has launched so many new channels for independent artists to emerge, but it's also become flooded with so many of them that it's not much easier for a band to make it big. And though Holt, who was the keynote speaker at the conference, talked more about his experiences as a music industry veteran than he did about his relatively new gig at MySpace, he did drop a few tidbits.

Most specifically, he talked about his faith in the unprecedented levels of data and statistics that the digital age can bring to the music industry.

"It's more interesting to me when an artist is being 'playlisted' than played," he said, adding that a very popular MySpace Music user can have as much reach and influence as a terrestrial radio station, and that MySpace wants to track exactly who those key influencers are. "The sharing of the music is, to me, a better way to understand virality and interest than just a passive play."

MySpace Music, a free streaming audio service, was launched by the News Corp.-owned social network just under a year ago, and Holt was installed as its chief early this year. News Corp. reportedly plans to convert MySpace into an "entertainment portal," now that Facebook has solidly eclipsed it in the social-networking game. MySpace has other issues, too: a recent management shuffle that installed former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta as CEO, significant layoffs, and reports that the music labels were dissatisfied with the performance of MySpace Music.

Interestingly, Holt was quick to characterize MySpace Music as an independent entity. "MySpace Music is a joint venture that was formed last year. We are an independent company that is still owned in part by MySpace, but we have our own staff," Holt explained at the New Music Seminar event. "Defining who we're really going to be as a business is helpful, and I think there's been a lot of confusion."

Amid economic woes, stagnant growth, and a management shakeup, onetime social-networking pioneer MySpace has announced that it has cut its head count by slightly under 30 percent in what the company calls a "return to start-up culture." Well, that's a nice way to put it.

Reports had circulated that MySpace would be laying off nearly half its employees in a move that had delayed its relocation to a bigger office space in the Los Angeles area. With the layoffs, MySpace's full-time U.S. employee roster will be down to 1,000 people--which means somewhere just south of 500 jobs were cut.

MySpace said that the layoffs are evenly distributed across all U.S. divisions of the company. Since MySpace also operates a number of offices overseas, it's not yet clear how they were affected (if at all), and representatives declined comment as to whether international offices would be affected down the road. CNET News has heard rumors that there may be consolidation in some of MySpace's European offices, something that the company did late last year when it merged its Amsterdam and Berlin offices.

"Today the domestic restructure is the only info we can share," a MySpace representative said in a phone call Tuesday.

Owen Van Natta, CEO of the News Corp.-owned social site, said in a release: "Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company. I understand that these changes are painful for many. They are also necessary for the long-term health and culture of MySpace. Our intent is to return to an environment of innovation that is centered on our user and our product."

Van Natta, the former chief operating officer at Facebook, was hired as CEO of MySpace late in April after a short stint at the head of start-up Project Playlist. Former CEO Chris DeWolfe had stepped down earlier that month, reportedly at the behest of Jonathan Miller, the new digital czar at News Corp. Executive shakeups at MySpace had been happening sporadically for nearly a year at that point.

MySpace's new executive lineup gives it solid entertainment street cred: Van Natta was joined by former MTV digital exec Jason Hirschhorn and former AOLer Michael Jones. Late last year, another MTV digital-media executive, Courtney Holt, joined MySpace as the head of its new MySpace Music division.

A source with knowledge of the situation said that senior management was spared Tuesday's cuts.

Launching MySpace Music, which focuses on free streaming music supported by advertising, was a return to the company's roots: once a hub for indie band promotion and community, MySpace had grown massive before Facebook began to catch up to it in international and then U.S. traffic. Partnerships with the likes of Google and a prominent endorsement of the OpenSocial developer initiative didn't help it regain traction as a networking destination.

Holt told CNET News in March that MySpace Music's traffic was "huge." But record label executives--who are partners in the MySpace Music joint venture--reported dissatisfaction with the revenue it was generating.

Last update at 11:56 a.m. PT.