When MySpace ^[1] relaunches this year, it will exchange its popularity contest with Facebook for a cutting session with Spotify and iTunes. The site plans to focus back on music, which has sustained the site even through its leanest times under News Corp ownership. And Justin Timberlake, who was once used to sing pop songs about crying and rivers but now seems to find nearly innumerable uses for himself, will sign on as the site’s creative director.

News Corp, which had been trying to unload the struggling social media site for years, sold MySpace to Specific Media in June for $35 million in June, down $545 million from its 2005 purchase price. MySpace plans to return its focus to the bands and music fans that have stuck with the site even while it lost credibility as a consumer social network.

Al Dejewski, the company’s new senior vice president of global marketing, says the site is on a rockstar-like detoxification regimen. “This young adult male needs to be put on a diet, we need to get it on P90X, clean its system and get back to its foundation. And we’ve found that foundation is music,” Dejewski told reporters. “No other music destination online today can claim the breadth of partnership we have with the four major music labels in addition to the tens of millions of independent artists and the libraries of their songs.”

Read more at Ad Age ^[2].