Myspace up for sale as Myspace Music President Courtney Holt steps down

By Andrew Couts February 25, 2011

The slow death of Myspace continued this week with the president of Myspace Music, Courtney Holt, stepping down from his post, reports AllThingsDigital. The news of Holt’s departure comes amid rumors that Myspace parent company News Corp. has kicked off the process of selling the failing social media site.

According to a memo to the Myspace staff written by Myspace CEO Mike Jones, Holt will transition to a “key advisor” position to both Myspace and News Corp. It is not yet clear whether Holt will take an executive-level position at any other company, though such a move seems likely.

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Myspace Music launched in 2008 as a joint venture between Myspace and a variety of major music labels. It remains one of the few sites that offers free, legal music streaming. And as anyone with a friend in a band knows, it has been one of the primary places for music group — mostly of the unknown variety — to go when they want to connect with fans. But it has still had trouble turning its traffic into profit.

Since this time last year, Myspace Music’s visitor number have dropped 46 percent, to 17 million unique US visitors per month. Myspace as a whole brought in 44.8 million unique visitors in January, reports the Wall Street Journal, a drop of 36 percent, according to numbers from comScore.

Last November, News Corp. COO Chase Carey admitted that News Corp. was open to the idea of selling the social networking site, which it purchased for $580 million in 2005. The news out today shows that about 20 parties, mostly private equity and venture capital entities, have show interest in purchasing Myspace.

As far as streaming music services are concerned, the sector seems only to be growing. Apple is reportedly planning to expand its iTunes service to allow users to store their music collections online, and stream the content to their Apple devices. Google is also looking into launching a music-streaming service. And UK-based music streaming site Spotify is rumored to be looking to introduce unlimited subscriptions to users in the US sometime in the near future.

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Features Editor for Digital Trends, Andrew Couts covers a wide swath of consumer technology topics, with particular focus on…

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