MusicRow.com is pleased to announce it has been enjoying record-setting traffic. Recent weekly page views from the week of August 10 jumped over 35% compared with the week of July 20.

The record for most number of views in a single day was established on July 28 topping over 5,600 and then reset again slightly higher on August 13. Another top tier traffic level was scored Aug. 17 becoming the site’s best-ever Monday.

Based upon ongoing results, total August 2009 views are expected to leap 53+% compared with the total June 2009 views.

MusicRow Publisher David M. Ross attributes the traffic spikes and overall surge to the publication’s new content strategy and social network marketing. “Positioning content in the appropriate venue has been key,” says Ross. “Our marketing interviews, sales analysis and other proprietary features are going into the subscriber-only @Musicrow morning reports, aimed at our most professional readers. The more general stories and press release items wind up online, open to all.”

Ross also points to Twitter and a Facebook Fan page as playing a role. “We’ve been nourishing our Twitter presence for a long time,” says Ross, “and it’s been well worth the effort and time we’ve invested. Currently we have over 9,050 followers. We’ve been careful to build trust with the people from all over the world that have elected to tune into our news feed and encourage all our readers and friends to join the fun (www.twitter.com/musicrow).

“Info distributors are facing many of the same challenges and engagement issues as the entertainment industry we cover,” says Ross. “It’s all about staying ahead of the curve, and giving our readers the content they need—when they want it, how they want it and in whatever format they want it. We’re very blessed to have so much support.”

MySpace has purchased music based social networking site iLike for an estimated $20 million. The sites will continue to operate separately but will begin sharing technology, such as iLike’s search capabilities, syndication network and discovery tools. MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta says the acquisition is about technical talent, as well as promoting MySpace across the broader social web.

Brothers Ali and Hadi Partovi founded iLike in 2006. It eventually grew to be the largest music application across all social networks with 55 million total users and 1.5 billion monthly impressions. The Partovis will stay on at the company.

In related MySpace news, the company expects to save a significant amount of money in licensing fees by turning off the feature that makes music play automatically whenever the site is visited. Reports say the company is spending around $10 million a month on paid streaming of songs, with autoplays accounting for a billion or more streams per month. It is expected that stopping this feature will give artist handlers more accurate listening data. Some users and MySpace execs saw this as one of the site’s distinguishing features. Accordingly, users can still opt-in to autoplay songs.

Nashville, TN (8/19/09)– SouthComm Inc., the parent of MusicRow Magazine and other niche publications, has signed an agreement to buy the assets of Nashville Scene and Nfocus magazine from City Press LLC.

“The Scene is the strongest arts and entertainment brand in Nashville,” said SouthComm CEO Chris Ferrell. “Pairing it and Nfocus with our other niche publications made good strategic sense.”

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. The acquisition is expected to close this week.

With the addition of the Scene and Nfocus, SouthComm will own eight Nashville-area publications, cementing its place as Middle Tennessee’s largest locally owned media company.

“NFocus is a Nashville original that will continue to be the city’s premier outlet for coverage of the social scene and philanthropy,” Ferrell said. “And, having been publisher of the Scene for three years, I’m also very familiar with the quality staff we’ll have the opportunity to bring on board.”

Founded in late 2007 after Ferrell left his post at the Scene, the company now employs more than 150 people, the majority of them in Middle Tennessee. It also operates an alternative newsweekly in Louisville as well as two custom publishing businesses that cater primarily to chambers of commerce.

“As the daily newspaper model struggles ever more, advertisers and readers are increasingly looking for next-generation sources of news, information and advertising,” Ferrell said, adding that the combined City Paper/Scene readership will be almost as large as that of The Tennessean.

“The key to our strategy is not the mass reach, however,” he explains. “It is being able to deliver specifically targeted audiences to our advertisers when they need to reach them. Few people read the whole daily paper; they read sections that appeal to them.

“We essentially are unbundling the daily. The City Paper is our brand for news and sports, the Nashville Post and BusinessTN are our business news brands, and the Scene gives us the strongest brand in the market for coverage of arts and culture. With this acquisition, we’ve built out our Nashville model. Over time, we will look to replicate our work here in other cities.”