Music discovery site
Project Playlist Inc. today
confirmed rumors that have been swirling for weeks, revealing that former Facebook Inc. chief operating officer Owen Van Natta has taken over as its CEO and that longtime America Online Inc. executive Bob Pittman is its latest investor. Pittman's Pilot Group invested an undisclosed amount in Playlist, which has built an audience of 38 million users but
faces a potentially crippling lawsuit from three major record labels.
Van Natta, who
spent seven years at Amazon.com Inc. [
AMZN] before joining Facebook, was
known to have been considered for the still-
unfilled CEO spot at the MySpace Inc.'s joint venture with the four major record labels. MySpace Music is instead
thought to be on the verge of hiring former MTV Networks executive Courtney Holt.
Private equity fund KR Capital Partners has invested in Project Playlist, and Van Natta himself was an investor before becoming the company's CEO. The Pilot Group also holds stakes in music blogging and social networking site
Buzznet Inc. and social music site
iLike Inc.Project Playlist allows users to create shareable playlists of streaming songs, searching for material wherever it's already lying around on the Web, such as blogs and social networking sites. Last I'd
heard, the company was still negotiating with labels to find a solution to its legal woes, and optimistic that there would be one, but the suit is ongoing. Project Playlist's massive user base gives it a fair amount of
leverage in forging an agreement with the labels, but none of its venture-backed peers has yet shown that it can generate enough advertising revenue to cover the cost of streaming song royalties, let alone the additional costs required to stay in business.
-- Paul BonanosSee press release from Project PlaylistSee
Apr. 29 and
Oct. 27 posts from Tech Confidential concerning Project Playlist
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