LEAKED: MySpace's Master Plan To Raise $50 Million And Relaunch As A Spotify Killer

The parent company of MySpace is trying to raise $50 million in order to re-launch MySpace as a direct competitor to Spotify and Pandora in 2013.

This is according to documents obtained by Business Insider, which we have included in this post.

Six years after buying MySpace for $580 million, News Corp sold it last summer to a company called Specific Media for $35 million.

Specific Media, a private company owned mostly by the Vanderhook family, changed its name to its name to Interactive Media Holdings, and took new funding from investors including Justin Timberlake.

Then Interactive launched a re-designed MySpace to a sup rising amount of critical praise. In a bigger surprise, since December 2011, MySpace traffic is up 36%.

But MySpace continued to flounder commercially. Documents show that it will generate revenues of just $15 million this year, up from a miserable $9 million in 2011. MySpace lost more than $40 million in 2012. Interactive Media expects it to lose another $25 million next year.

Meanwhile, Interactive's other big property, Specific Media took a hit as ad buyers turned to real-time bidding solutions over traditional ad networks. Revenues declined from $42 million in 2011 to a projected $35 million in 2012 – both down from a high of $60 million in 2010.

Now, Interactive Media holdings is out looking for another $50 million in funding.

In pitch materials dated from November 16, 2012, Interactive says it plans to use most of the money to re-launch MySpace as an alternative to Pandora and Spotify. $10 million will go to marketing and $15 million to $25 million to for licensing deals with the labels. Another $15 million to $25 million for "general working capital."

Interactive says it plans to launch a music subscription business for mobile in the second quarter of 2013. 

In the deck, Interactive says the big competitive advantages for MySpace versus Spotify and Pandora is that it pays labels a lower rate for song plays than Spotify and Pandora. MySpace relies on 27 million songs from unsigned artists, who account for 50% of the music played on its site. 

We've included Interactive Media Holdings pitch deck below.

It's fascinating, for two reasons: 

• We get to look at hard numbers you'll never find a press release. Can you believe that only 6 years after selling for $580 million, MySpace revenues were only $9 million in 2011? 
• We get to see how tech companies pitch themselves for a huge fund-raise. The optimism is thick. Look, to the right, at how Interactive takes actual declining revenues and then "estimates" their stunning turn around and growth.

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