MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe wanted a one-stop music shop that would have included event ticket and merchandise purchases along with streaming audio and paid downloads. What he got were agreements from the four major labels for the streaming audio and a deal with Amazon to sell digital downloads. Which is something. Also, there's handful of big-name sponsors like McDonald's and Toyota, and MySpace certainly still has a huge user base of music lovers. Whether or not this is "the one" for the record industry remains to be seen. How's the service?Of course, it's highly-compressed digital audio, and therefore pretty crappy. But I have to admit, the offerings go well beyond the pop selected for the Jonas Brothers' playlist — while I'm sure the cashiers at Amoeba Records might still sneer at the selection's depth, my searches for everything from Os Mutantes to Gas Huffer, Blind Willie McTell to Mongo Santamaria came up with multiple tracks to choose from. Eventually. The site is currently running incredibly slow, which may be a good sign of interest or a critical fumble of the launch. Users frustrated in the process of creating playlists might just go back to Last.fm, Imeem, iTunes or any of a number of other places to preview and purchase tracks.

If Silicon Valley is mentally disconnected from this week's Wall Street mess, it's because ad-supported companies dominate the Valley these days. High-net-worth investors aren't reeled in with cheap banners, so the demise of Lehman Brothers or Merrill Lynch hardly pinches budgets. Lehman spent just $501,900 on ads, both online and off, in the first half of 2008. Merrill Lynch, which has a much larger consumer business, still only spent $38 million on advertising last year. Still, some 150,000 people will lose their jobs in this week's fallout. That's a lot of tech infrastructure no one will want to pay for anymore. Lehman, for example, spent $309 million on IT last quarter alone. What's more, Lehman's investment banking connections run deep in the Valley's world of startups, VCs and big company buyers. Below, five tech companies that find themselves wishing they could unleash themselves from Wall Street's fate.

News Corp.'s online arm, Fox Interactive Media, has struggled to attract online talent while paying them like a startup would. (News Corp. shares just don't cut it.) The solution for the unit, which includes MySpace and a passel of lesser-known websites: a long-term incentive plan, or LTIP, which offers a sort of phantom equity to executives in the division. In the last few weeks, the numbers for the most recent fiscal year which ended June 30 were distributed, and they were "disastrously low," says a tipster. "Most executives were already looking to leave," he says. "They hated FIM and the only reason they were staying was because of promises made about the LTIP." True, FIM hasn't quite made its aggressively optimistic numbers. But executives believe the real reason their bonuses are so low is MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe's fat contract.DeWolfe and his MySpace cohort, Tom Anderson, renewed their contracts last fall with News Corp. last year for $15 million apiece, spread over two years. Paying that amount has, FIM executives believe, left nothing for them. "They're pissed," says our tipster. Then again, do these puffed-up Fox executives deserve much more than they're getting? Pop quiz: Name a Fox Interactive property other than MySpace.

News Corp. reports earnings tomorrow — but no one's worrying about how many copies of The Simpsons Fox sold on Blu-ray. Wall Street's worries are centered on how ads are doing on MySpace. After months of denials, a Fox executive has conceded the obvious to the Wall Street Journal: Google's keyword-pegged ads are bombing on MySpace. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said as much in discussing his company's results, but MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe was quick to deny a problem at the time. With Fox Interactive's parent company, News Corp., reporting quarterly results tomorrow, we suspect the Fox source let the bad news leak early in an effort to mix a hint of optimism in the story. The result:Instead of a deeper look at why the Google-MySpace partnership is failing, the Journal produced an explainer on MySpace's nearly-year old "hyptertargeting" ad product — the one that, according to the Journal, enables MySpace to double the amount it charges advertisers by categorizing users "into more than 1,000 'buckets,' including rodeo watchers, scrapbook enthusiasts and Dancing With the Stars viewers." Concert organizer Live Nation and shoemaker Adidas bought some inventory and walked away pleased, the story tells us. One problem: like all behavioral targeting technology, "hypertargeting" faces increased scrutiny from Congressmen on a privacy kick. Another problem: targeted or no, many marketers don't believe MySpace users pay any attention to ads while they're cruising each other's profiles.

A startup founder tells us that, over the weekend, he and his friends overheard TechCrunch writers celebrating the sale of Michael Arrington's blog to News Corp.'s Fox Interactive unit — Rupert Murdoch's home for MySpace, Rotten Tomatoes, and other wayward websites. The source tells us that the deal has been signed, but TechCrunch is waiting for its summer party at August Capital's Sand Hill Road offices to announce it. Another source who's spoken recently to Arrington says that a deal is on. But a highly placed News Corp. source says there's "no truth" to the rumor. What's behind this wave of TechCrunch sale talk?

Lost amidst the hullabaloo over Fox's $350 million new LA headquarters for MySpace and its other Web properties: Just how bad the parking is at MySpace's current office. A former employees tells me that finding a spot in the morning regularly took an hour of circling. In announcing the new office, Fox Interactive CEO Peter Levinsohn reminded employees he had "communicated with you about our space and parking challenges." Anyone have that memo? I'd love to read it. In the meantime, consider this: MySpace won't completely move into the new facility until 2010, meaning its engineers will continue to spend countless hours circling parking lots instead of coding for the next two years. Plenty of time for Facebook to widen its technical lead over Rupert Murdoch's aging social network.

The MySpace homepage today features the same burning-building graphic used in the promotional poster for the upcoming Dark Knight sequel. It's not a new image, but by pushing the campaign online, it certainly reminds me of recent attempts to trigger epileptics by posting strobing images to epilepsy forums — since survivors of the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder might cry "trigger." Maybe someone at Fox Interactive did it for the lulz.

We're on to Round Two in our worst-tech-job contest. We've whittled down 10 terrible gigs down to five:

Back in August 2006, when Google agreed to pay News Corp. $900 million to serve ads against MySpace, News Corp. COO Peter Chernin bragged, "Whoever said it remains to be seen whether we can monetize [MySpace], hopefully it's a little clearer this week." Almost two years later, "monetizing" MySpace seems more difficult than ever. At least, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "MySpace did not monetize as well as we thought," Schmidt told a German reporter.

Customer support specialist, Fox Interactive, MySpace division

Slide executive Keith Rabois isn't the only one who sees serious cash in silly games. To get more in on the action, News Corp. property IGN is trying to acquire Tom Fulp's Newgrounds, a Flash videogame portal that specializes in violent games like The Last Stand 2, featured in the video embedded above. A sale could be lucrative for Fulp.

Fox Interactive Media, News Corp.'s Web division overseeing properties including MySpace, Photobucket and Rotten Tomatoes, saw its revenues drop in the second quarter to $210 million., from $233 million in the previous quarter. News Corp. president and COO told analysts today that the division would not meet its $1 billion revenue goal for its fiscal year, likely coming up $100 million short. He began the call: "Let me begining by saying yes, we will fall short of what were very aggressive projections." Insiders whisper that News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch set the numbers high to put pressure on MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe. DeWolfe and MySpace friend-in-chief Tom Anderson signed a two-year, $30 million contract last fall to continue running the site.

Former Fox Interactive exec turned venture capitalist Ross Levinsohn only needs to finish the paperwork to become the biggest name on Microsoft's list of 10 nominees to replace Yahoo's board, TechCrunch reports and BoomTown confirms. The high-profile rubber-stamping position should suit Levinsohn's ego just fine.

Rupert Murdoch's new handpicked president of FIM Audience Network, Adam Bain, has the requisite big idea to save MySpace: an ad network which lets his salespeople sell ads all over the Web, not just on MySpace and other News Corp. sites.The idea is to take what MySpace has learned about its own users and share it with publishers and advertisers, to better target ads. What behavioral insights Bain expects to garner from "thanks for the add" isn't clear. But at this point the Fox Interactive Media Audience Network remains little more than a thought bubble — and Bain left it to MySpace's top US sales exec, Bryce Emo (pictured), to deliver the news.

When the reshuffled Yahoo Media Group in Santa Monica holds an all-hands on April 15, it's going to be awfully tempting for Adam Bain to send spies. He's the the head of Fox Interactive's new ad network and his unit moving into the "Yahoo Center," reports PaidContent. Talks over renaming the place are underway. We nominate: "Bill's place." (Photo by stevelyon)

Yesterday, we reported that MySpace continues to beat Facebook soundly in traffic. But some, including Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget, reject the U.S. numbers we cited from Hitwise, saying worldwide traffic indicates "Facebook is coming up behind MySpace like a Ferrari about to blow past a bus." And how could we ignore such a simile? It's totally awesome, dude! So here's a chart comparing worldwide traffic for Facebook and MySpace, from ComScore.

News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch recently paid a visit to social network Bebo, according to Bebo employee Emma Carlsgaard, who posted an update to her Bebo profile about the sighting. What's Rupe doing visiting Bebo? A recent rumor suggests acquisition talks.

Fox Interactive Media missed its internal revenue targets for July and August. So, unless they have an extraordinary September, FIM will miss for the quarter. Perhaps the Google/Myspace ad deal isn't working out as well as Tom had hoped. [Silicon Alley Insider]

Heads-up, entrepreneurs. Ready to sell your startup? Reconnect with every contact you have at Fox Interactive. Rupert Murdoch is about to go on a shopping spree. [Financial Times]

Fox Interactive head (and MySpace buyer for News Corp) Ross Levinsohn (pictured) on Brad Greenspan, the former MySpace founder who's sued MySpace for allegedly lying about its value to investors, and Fox for allegedly censoring him: