MySpace Tried to Buy Spotify

A former MySpace exec has delivered an unflattering look inside the “spaghetti-ball mess” that was the once-mighty social network, saying that it should have changed its name and gone “all-in on music,” instead of trying to fend off Facebook, The Guardian reports. Sean Percival, who was the site’s vp of online marketing, revealed this week that MySpace even tried to buy Spotify, its successor in terms of meshing streaming music and social. As you may have guessed, “they sure as hell were not selling to us. They didn’t need to.”

Spotify, unsurprisingly, refused to comment on the supposed offer.

At the By:Larm conference in Oslo, Percival spoke about MySpace’s revolutionary deal with major labels that allowed users to stream songs for free. “You can do that on Spotify now… but that was so unique,” he said. “It was a very special deal: we paid about $10 million a year to get that deal, just to have the deal, and then we paid for all of the usage as well. That was something we had that nobody else had. We brokered that deal early on with the labels, and nobody else could get even close. We should have gone all-in on music and cut ship on everything else.”

Source: Billboard