News Corp and Vevo.com are in talks for the music video site to take over News Corp’s social network MySpace as part of a new joint venture between the two companies, according to a Bloomberg News report on Tuesday.
Vevo.com is owned by a consortium of major record companies and provides fans with ad-supported music videos. According to the report, News Corp sees the new venture as being able to draw on the huge cache of MySpace music assets, including artist and fan pages, as well as MySpace Music, the part of the social network that streams songs online.
Vevo is the fifth largest video site in the US with 45.9 million visitors in February.
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp bought MySpace for 580 million dollars in July 2005, when it was the world’s most popular social networking site. It has since been eclipsed by Facebook, which is valued at over 50 billion dollars. MySpace has seen its traffic fall steadily, with the latest figures showing a 29-per-cent fall in February to 62.6 million visitors.
