One of MySpace's co-founders, CEO Chris DeWolfe, is to leave the company, it has been announced. In a statement, parent company NewsCorp said that DeWolfe's exit was by "mutual agreement", although his departure comes ahead of the end of his contract, which was due for renewal in October. He will continue to sit on the board of MySpace China and act as a strategic advisor to the company.
In an email to employees, MySpace's parent company NewsCorp's new CEO Of Digital Media, Jonathan Miller, also said that he is currently in discussions with MySpace's other founder, president and everybody's friend Tom Anderson "regarding his role within the organisation".
DeWolfe's replacement has not yet been officially announced, but according to reports, Facebook's former Chief Revenue Officer and current CEO of music streaming site ProjectPlaylist, Owen Van Natta, is Miller's first choice for the role. Van Natta was one of the names put forward to take over the company's new streaming music service MySpace Music last year, but was beaten to that role by former MTV exec Courtney Holt.
As previously reported, three of MySpace's other top execs - COO Amit Kapur, Senior VP Of Technology Jim Benedetto and Senior VP Of Product Strategy Steve Pearman - left the company last month to set up a new venture.
Although the exact reason for the management changes is unknown, rumour has it that senior tech types at MySpace are growing increasingly unhappy about the general shoddiness of the website which, despite various redesigns, is still operating on a system not originally built to run many, if any, of what are now its core functions - offering music and video content, for example. As more and more companies compete in MySpace's, er, space with much better content delivery systems, it's now critical that the company comes up with something better.
Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group, told the LA Times: "The MySpace platform did not evolve. It was doing the same thing. Whereas Facebook, every couple of months, there's a major change, and they drag the members along with them".
Commenting on how MySpace's poorly received attempt to do something new last year - MySpace Music - was handled and his attempts to rescue it after a lacklustre US launch, its recently appointed head Courtney Holt told New Media Age last week: "I'm working on trying to make sense of a business that existed as a bunch of features. So we went silent while we brought in the right people. Perhaps we launched the business before we had the key stakeholders in place internally".