MySpace has purchased music based social networking site iLike for an estimated $20 million. The sites will continue to operate separately but will begin sharing technology, such as iLike’s search capabilities, syndication network and discovery tools. MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta says the acquisition is about technical talent, as well as promoting MySpace across the broader social web.

Brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi founded iLike in 2006. It eventually grew to be the largest music application across all social networks with 55 million total users and 1.5 billion monthly impressions. The Partovis will stay on at the company.

In related MySpace news, the company expects to save a significant amount of money in licensing fees by turning off the feature that makes music play automatically whenever the site is visited. Reports say the company is spending around $10 million a month on paid streaming of songs, with autoplays accounting for a billion or more streams per month. It is expected that stopping this feature will give artist handlers more accurate listening data. Some users and MySpace execs saw this as one of the site’s distinguishing features. Accordingly, users can still opt-in to autoplay songs.

Nashville, TN (8/19/09)– SouthComm Inc., the parent of MusicRow Magazine and other niche publications, has signed an agreement to buy the assets of Nashville Scene and Nfocus magazine from City Press LLC.

“The Scene is the strongest arts and entertainment brand in Nashville,” said SouthComm CEO Chris Ferrell. “Pairing it and Nfocus with our other niche publications made good strategic sense.”

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. The acquisition is expected to close this week.

With the addition of the Scene and Nfocus, SouthComm will own eight Nashville-area publications, cementing its place as Middle Tennessee’s largest locally owned media company.

“NFocus is a Nashville original that will continue to be the city’s premier outlet for coverage of the social scene and philanthropy,” Ferrell said. “And, having been publisher of the Scene for three years, I’m also very familiar with the quality staff we’ll have the opportunity to bring on board.”

Founded in late 2007 after Ferrell left his post at the Scene, the company now employs more than 150 people, the majority of them in Middle Tennessee. It also operates an alternative newsweekly in Louisville as well as two custom publishing businesses that cater primarily to chambers of commerce.

“As the daily newspaper model struggles ever more, advertisers and readers are increasingly looking for next-generation sources of news, information and advertising,” Ferrell said, adding that the combined City Paper/Scene readership will be almost as large as that of The Tennessean.

“The key to our strategy is not the mass reach, however,” he explains. “It is being able to deliver specifically targeted audiences to our advertisers when they need to reach them. Few people read the whole daily paper; they read sections that appeal to them.

“We essentially are unbundling the daily. The City Paper is our brand for news and sports, the Nashville Post and BusinessTN are our business news brands, and the Scene gives us the strongest brand in the market for coverage of arts and culture. With this acquisition, we’ve built out our Nashville model. Over time, we will look to replicate our work here in other cities.”

According to The NPD Group, a leading market research company, while CDs remain the most popular format for paid music purchases, digital music sales are making up an ever-greater share of U.S. music sales. CDs comprised 65 percent of all music sold in the first half of 2009 compared to paid digital downloads, which comprised 35 percent. By comparison, paid digital music downloads comprised just 20 percent of sales in 2007 – growing to 30 percent of the music market last year.

Russ Crupnick, NPD VP of entertainment industry analysis says, “With digital music sales growing at 15 to 20 percent, and CDs falling by an equal proportion, digital music sales will nearly equal CD sales by the end of 2010.”

According to NPD MusicWatch, when it comes to the unit-sales volume of music sold at retail – including paid digital music downloads and CDs – Apple iTunes leads in the U.S. with 25 percent of music units sold, which is up from 21 percent in 2008 and 14 percent in 2007. Walmart (including Walmart.com) remains in second position with 14 percent of music volume sold. Best Buy ranked third.

iTunes also continued to solidify its lead in the digital music arena, as consumer downloads from iTunes comprised 69 percent of the digital music market in the first half of 2009, followed by AmazonMP3 at 8 percent.

Walmart leads all sellers of CDs with a 20 percent share of the physical music market, followed by Best Buy at 16 percent, and Target and Amazon tied at 10 percent each.