MySpace Music CEO Debuting Tomorrow?
MySpace's very, very long search for someone to run the social network's new music site is just about over: A person familiar with the situation says the company has just about wrapped up negotiations with Courtney Holt, who heads up digital music at Viacom's (VIA) MTV.
Context & Ripple Effects
MySpace has spent months trying to staff up MySpace Music, the ad-supported streaming joint venture it built on the back of its own record label and years of music-first features like selling performance videos. The search dragged long enough that word of an offer to MTV digital music chief Courtney Holt surfaced a week ago in CNET's report, and this update says negotiations are nearly closed.
First-order effects
- MySpace Music finally gets a named executive, letting the JV move from negotiation mode into actual launch planning; Viacom's MTV loses the executive who ran its digital music strategy.
Second-order effects
- A leader in place puts pressure on the major-label partners behind the venture to finalize licensing terms and revenue splits, since a CEO without a catalog deal has nothing to sell.
- The hire signals MySpace is competing directly with MTV's own digital music ambitions, forcing Viacom to decide whether to rebuild or retrench after losing Holt.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, legacy media companies keep becoming talent suppliers to social platforms rather than competitors to them — a structural reversal of who owns the audience relationship in music distribution.
- The long, public hiring struggle itself becomes a data point on how hard it is to convert social-network traffic into a durable licensed-music business, a question later ventures like Imeem's playlist revival would keep testing.
The trend: Social networks are formalizing their music ambitions by importing traditional media executives, marking the shift from organic fan communities to structured, label-licensed streaming businesses.