The popular social music discovery service iLike has just launched its own music store, hoping it would provide the company with a more reliable revenue source in light of the declining online ad market. The news, coupled with iLike's immensely popular social networking apps, has made many ask how is MySpace, which is repositioning itself as a entertainment portal with its greatest asset at the moment being MySpace Music, going to respond to the growing threat. Well, it looks like the answer is already here, with TechCrunch reporting that the social networking giant is in late talks to acquire iLike.

iLike is a music discovery and recommendation service boasting over 50 million registered users. Similar to Last.fm, it analyzes what its users listen to and, also based on their friends' tastes, recommends new artists. The site recently launched an in-house music store to supplement the Apple and Amazon offerings, which will continue to be an option. But its greatest asset is the number of social networking apps and widgets, available across a multitude of sites, which are regularly the most popular music apps on most social networks.

One of its most successful apps is on Facebook, not surprisingly since it is, by far, the largest social network in the world and the US, where the iLike app enjoys 10 million active monthly users mostly because the social network doesn't have its own dedicated music offering like MySpace. What's also interesting is that MySpace itself will be acquiring iLike, not the social network's joint venture with the major music labels, MySpace Music.

There are few details at the moment but the price is speculated to be around $20 million, a rather low figure based on investments so far. iLike has raised $16.5 million so far with the funding coming from its founders but mostly from Ticketmaster. The Tiketmaster $13.3 million investment valuated the company at $53.2 million, even if that number has significantly dropped since then.