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With an owner that’s rooted in old media, and known for his rapacious treatment of his conquests, is there any hope for Myspace?

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News Corporation today announced that Owen Van Natta will step down from his position as MySpace CEO, effective immediately. Mr. Van Natta will be replaced by newly-elevated co-Presidents Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, who will each report to Jon Miller, Chairman and CEO of Digital Media for News Corporation. All three executives joined MySpace in April 2009, with Mr. Jones and Mr. Hirschhorn previously serving as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Product Officer, respectively.

“Owen took on an incredible challenge in working to refocus and revitalize MySpace, and the business has shown very positive signs recently as a result of his dedicated work,” said Jon Miller, News Corporation’s Chairman and CEO of Digital Media. “However, in talking to Owen about his priorities both personally and professionally going forward, we both agreed that it was best for him to step down at this time. I want to thank Owen for all of his efforts.”

Mr. Miller continued, “Mike and Jason have demonstrated true leadership in their operational and product guidance, respectively, and I have the utmost confidence in both of them to lead MySpace into its next chapter.”

In a joint statement, Mr. Jones and Mr. Hirschhorn noted:
“We joined MySpace last April with very a specific set of goals in mind, and are anxious to continue working together to make those goals a reality. This business is now pointed in the right direction, and we have a great team of employees that will continue to push MySpace closer to its potential as the place where people go to be discovered and to discover great content.”

Mr. Van Natta commented:
“MySpace is an incredibly unique place and we’ve made real gains in terms of product focus and user experience. I’m proud of the work we’ve all accomplished together and look forward to watching its continued growth.”

Prior to his role as MySpace COO, Mr. Jones founded and operated several online businesses, including Userplane, a leading provider of tools for online communities such as MySpace. Userplane was acquired in 2006 by AOL, where Jones subsequently served as a senior vice president and focused on social media monetization and also pioneered the distribution of widgets and other technology to Web publishers. He also was founder and CEO of Tsavo Media, an online content and search network developing next-generation publishing platforms and technology services.

Since joining MySpace, Mr. Hirschhorn oversaw all aspects of product development, and previously has led both start-up and established online businesses. He was president of Sling Media, Inc’s Entertainment Group, which created consumer-driven applications and services for the Slingbox device, and was chief digital officer at MTV Networks, where he oversaw the company’s digital media businesses, products and strategies. Hirschhorn joined MTV Networks following the acquisition of his company, Mischief New Media, which provided interactive services to the entertainment industry.

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An interesting point made in the article is that:

…much of Gaga’s audience got her music for free, and legally. They have listened to free streams—by the hundreds of millions—on YouTube and the other online services that Gaga currently leads, according to research firm BigChampagne. On MySpace, Gaga has had 321.5 million plays. By contrast, singer Susan Boyle tallied only 133,000 plays, despite scoring the No. 2 selling album of 2009. A difference (among many) between Gaga and the dowdy Scotswoman discovered on a British talent show: Ms. Boyle’s material, including “Amazing Grace,” was traditional—and so were most of her buyers. Some 97% of her albums were sold on compact disc.

This really underlines the generation gap between Gaga and Boyle, which points at a larger truth – while it is still possible to have enourmous commercial success through the traditional routes, Boyle’s fame being delivered mostly through the TV and her sales being on CD, this market will be dwindling with time. Young consumers are more used to getting their music online and for free.

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Myspace will be making an effort to re-enliven its music content, focussing on “discovery, sharing and showcasing” new content, including games and video. Read the full trasncript of the article here on TechCrunch.

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Songkick will solve all these problems for you. They have a plugin for iTunes and for Last.FM that will analyse your music library or your top listened bands and compile a list of when and where they’re gigging in the foreseeable future, and will send you alerts when gigs come up close to you for your listened artists. They also provide direct links to ticket vendors, with a price comparison for each, so you’ll always know first, and never pay over the odds for a ticket.

From the artist’s perspective, you can also add concerts to the online database, so that your listeners are automatically updated when you list new gigs. Just make sure that we distribute your music to last.fm when you sign it up to our digital music distribution service, so that your music can be discovered on their streaming service.

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The MySpace Music team is working around the clock to duplicate your imeem playlists and make them available to you on myspacemusic.com as soon as possible. In the coming weeks, we will be emailing you with instructions on how to claim your playlists on MySpace Music, using your MySpace login. If you don’t have a MySpace account you can sign up for one here.

If you have questions about MySpace, please visit http://faq.myspace.com/app/home.

Thanks for your patience. We will be in touch soon.

- MySpace Music Team

How a net business with hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue can allow so much time to slip by in a market where they’re losing ground every day is hard to fathom – small as Imeem’s fire-sale purchase price may have been compared to Myspace’s turnover, their tech contribution was substantial, and constitutes a big opportunity for Myspace to catch back up to it’s competitors. One can only assume that Imeem were playing harball and not releasing anything before the lawyers had all shaken hands and inked the contracts, and are not particularly motivated by the Murdoch lash. I can see that having your company fail under you and being bought out by Darth Rupert might be disheartening.

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“We held an emergency board meeting to shut everything down,” one executive told Digital Music News.  “The [Orchard] lawsuit was definitely the final nail.”

Subsequently, other executives close to the situation confirmed the decision.  “They just ran out of cash, it was just a cash thing,” one executive shared, also anonymously.  “The potential liabilities – $150,000 per stream – could get astronomical.  [Imeem] thought they had a case, but they couldn’t afford to fight it.”

I think it’s a shame that Imeem has been forced to give up their autonomy, but the fact of their acquisition by Myspace shows who got the model the right way round; Imeem couldn’t stay afloat because they couldn’t afford to pay for the licensing costs of the music they were using from the advertising they sold, and because they were not efficient enough in properly securing the rights to use it, hence the court case threatened by the Orchard, whereas Myspace gets everyone to sign up their music for free – read their sign-up agreement again – and their proposition snowballed, a little free music, and a few million users kept growing until they had every major act and every teenage girl in America signed up. The combination of huge traffic and no licensing costs meant that they were able to pocket all of their ad revenue, but they are not as attractive a proposition to the artists and record labels as there is no revenue coming back to them in the same way that Spotify sends money upstream per play, unless,  like the major labels, you’ve got enough clout to demand a revenue sharing deal. If MOG or Spotify can find a way to include the band info and minor social element that Myspace provided, or perhaps team up with Facebook to provide music streaming and playlist sharing then Myspace will be blown out of the water – regardless of which little social startups they squash into their business in the meantime.

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Courtney Holt, an MTV exectuive, is rumoured to be named as the new president of Myspace Music as early as today.

MySpace Music is the digital music service formed by News Corp. and the four largest recording companies. Some observers say that MySpace, with a well-established history of offering music, could emerge as a competitor to Apple’s iTunes.

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