MySpace tried to buy Spotify

Sean Percival, former VP of online marketing for failed social network MySpace has revealed it tried to purchase Spotify.

Speaking at the By:Larm conference in Oslo yesterday, Percival said: “Unknown thing: we tried to buy Spotify and they sure as hell were not selling to us. They didn’t need to.”

When Spotify launched in 2008, MySpace was the frontrunner of social networking and although Percival didn’t mention exactly when the offer was made by its parent News Corporation to Spotify, it would have been between 2009 and 2011, during his tenure at MySpace.

Percival, now an investor at the Silicon Valley-based seed fund 500 Startups, was discussing what went wrong with MySpace: “We really should have just gone all-in on music,” he said. “At the time MySpace had a very, very unique deal with labels. They were the only site on the web that you could go and play any song from a major label for free.”

Percival said the deal with major labels saw MySpace pay “about $10m a year to get that deal” as well as extra payments for usage.

“That was something we had that nobody else had,” Percival said at By:Larm. “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.”

Percival also called out News Corp. executive chairman Rupert Murdoch for a kiss of death comment he made in an earnings call. Murdoch said MySpace would make $1bn in revenue one year.

“The boss said we have to make a billion dollars, so I guess we need to make a billion dollars […] They just didn’t care: they had no respect for the users. It was all about monetisation. Making money, squeezing every dollar out of it."

Percival said Mudoch’s stray comment came at a time when MySpace was earning $50m to $100m in annual revenue and resulted in the company steering away from social networking to launch products like MySpace Books with HarperCollins.

“And think about Facebook, the ultimate winner here. No focus on monetisation early on. Very few ads. And when they do ads, they actually do very nice ads,” he said. “They do more native, more inline advertising, things that feel a little more natural.”