Justin Timberlake To Buy A Share Of MySpace
June 30th, 2011 | by Jen |Justin Timberlake apparently wasn’t satisfied with just playing a social media impresario in the movies, so now he’s becoming one in real life.
The pop star, who played Napster co-founder Sean Parker in The Social Network, a movie about Facebook, has joined Specific Media in buying its downtrodden rival, MySpace, from News Corp in a deal that closed Wednesday in the US.
Timberlake will have an office at MySpace’s Beverly Hills headquarters and a staff of about a half dozen people working for him “around the clock” developing his ideas for the site, said Specific Media CEO Tim Vanderhook.
The partners are set to unveil their plans for reviving the flagging site in a couple of months.
“When we met with Justin and we discussed what our strategy was, we hit a chord with him,” Vanderhook told The Associated Press. “One of his passions is he really enjoys helping other artists and creating a community for people to really express themselves. I think we were blown away that we were able to get someone like Justin to be so excited about what we were doing.”
The deal is for $US35 million, mostly in Specific Media stock, according to a person familiar with the matter. That’s a small fraction of the $US580 million that News Corp paid for the site six years ago. The sale resulted in the layoff of about half of the site’s remaining 500 workers, said the person, who was not authorised to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.