The move comes a week after the News Corp. unit said it would cut 420 jobs in the U.S., or nearly 30 percent of its domestic work force. Combined, the cuts will reduce MySpaces employee base by nearly 40 percent to about 1,150.
“Our goal to tap into as many international markets as possible drove us to create too many offices around the globe, and with them came inefficiencies,” Chief Executive Owen Van Natta, a former executive at rival Facebook, said in a memo sent to employees Tuesday.
Van Natta, 39, started in his new job in April with a mandate to [...]

The move comes less than two months after MySpace, a unit of Rupert Murdochs News Corp., hired former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta, 39, as its new chief executive.
It also comes a day after data from tracking firm comScore show Facebook has caught up with MySpace in monthly U.S. visitors for the first time.
“Simply put, our staffing levels were bloated and hindered our ability to be an efficient and nimble team-oriented company,” Van Natta said in a statement.
The cuts amount to about 420 people, bringing the total number of MySpaces U.S. staff to 1,000. As of May, Facebook had about [...]

Owen Van Natta didnt detail specifics but indicated that the ability to make changes to the site was a reason he took the job of MySpace chief executive last month.
“When I look at MySpace theres just so much opportunity to build,” Van Natta said at The Wall Street Journals D: All Things Digital conference. “I took the job because theres a lot more that can be done around innovation.”
Though praised for its substantial entertainment content, MySpace has been criticized for falling behind rival Facebook when it comes to technology. Its worldwide user base has also stagnated at about 130 million, [...]

Michael Jones, whos founded several online businesses, will serve as MySpaces chief operating officer. Jones, 39, replaces Amit Kapur, who left last month.
Jason Hirschhorn, most recently the president of Sling Media Inc.s entertainment group, will be chief product officer, a new position that focuses on the sites look and feel.
Though praised for its substantial entertainment content, MySpace has been criticized for falling behind rival Facebook when it comes to technology. Its worldwide user base has also stagnated at about 130 million, compared with Facebooks 200 million.
Mondays appointments come in the heels of last weeks CEO shake-up at Beverly Hills, Calif.-based [...]

MySpace owner News Corp. said Wednesday the decision was made by mutual agreement with former AOL Chief Executive Jonathan Miller, who was appointed News Corp.s chief digital officer April 1.
DeWolfe, 43, helped launch the site in January 2004. He will remain on the board of MySpace China and be a strategic adviser to the company.
Co-founder Tom Anderson, 33, who is every account holders first friend and acts as its glitch fixer and president, is also in talks about taking a new role. Anderson is being considered for a creative product role that will take him away from his day-to-day responsibilities, [...]

“I remember going into his office when we were very small,” said MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe, “when most other companies wouldnt pay attention to us.”
Holt, then a marketing vice president with Interscope Geffen A&M, urged bands such as Nine Inch Nails, Weezer and The Black Eyed Peas to nurture MySpace profile pages too. The bands streamed new songs for free on their MySpace profiles, and some had the best album launches of their careers.
“The artists loved it and it created a Pied Piper effect for the fans,” Holt said. When it came to music promotion, Holt realized, MySpace was like [...]

Kapur, Jim Benedetto and Steve Pearman will stay on “for the next few weeks,” the Beverly Hills, California-based company said yesterday in a statement. Benedetto oversaw engineering, while Pearman managed product strategy.
The departures follow last weeks resignation of News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin, who supervised the New York-based media companys Fox operations in Los Angeles, including Fox Interactive. MySpace is part of that unit, which is cutting jobs to cope with a slump in advertising sales.
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A deal that will let users have copyrighted movies and material on their pages has been developed. MySpace generally tries to keep such clips off its social network along with other copyright-protected content that users post. The News Corp.-owned site removes clips at the request of the videos copyright owners. Google Inc.s YouTube has a similar policy, although Viacom is suing YouTube for allegedly profiting from clips of Viacom shows posted online.
Now MySpace will take a different approach with videos produced by partners it makes in its new ad deal.
Under this first partnership, MySpace users will be allowed to upload [...]

MySpace’s music program is growing with the addition of a new independent recording partnership.
IODA founder and Chief Executive Kevin Arnold said he expects songs from its catalog to start showing up through MySpace Music in December. IODAs catalog includes tunes from soul group Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.
The distributors tracks will join several million songs that are available for MySpaces roughly 120 million users to hear for free on the site.
Of these songs, about 1.3 million come from one independent music distributor, The Orchard, while most of the rest are from the major labels: Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music [...]