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A raft of AOL Music’s digital music sites have been sold and will find a home among the titles of its new owners, Townsquare Media Group.
In a deal with AOL Inc, Townsquare has agreed to acquire country music siteThe Boot, hip hop and R&B site the BoomBox, heavy metal site NoiseCreep plusComics Alliance. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Confirmation of the transaction comes a little over a month after news broke that AOL Music would shut down.
The acquisitions will complement Townsquare’s existing portfolio of premium music and entertainment websites which include Taste of Country, PopCrush,ScreenCrush and Okayplayer, and reach more than 52 million combined U.S. monthly unique visitors, according to the company. The four new Web assets boast a total combined audience of some 3.5 million unique visitors, the company notes, with “The Boot” leading the way at 1.4 Million.
It should make a nice fit, and Townsquare know what they’re getting. The radio and media chain’s executive VP and chief digital officer Bill Wilson was a long-time exec with AOL, and a major music company exec before that. Prior to joining Townsquare in 2010, Wilson had served as president of AOL Media, where he had overall responsibility for its global content strategy. Earlier in his career, he’d served as senior VP for worldwide marketing at Bertelsmann Music Group.
An as-yet-unknown number of staffers will migrate from AOL Music to Townsquare. They’ll join a team that already includes the entire pack of full-time employees who’ve recently made the move over from Comics Alliance.
Townsquare has been beefing-up its digital music activities of late. Last August, the company announced it had acquired the MOG Music Network business from MMN Media while a few months earlier, Cumulus Media revealed it would sell 55 stations in 11 different markets to Townsquare Media.