MySpace.com announced Wednesday that it bought the popular music sharing Web site iLike Inc. The acquisition price was not released, but multiple industry blogs reported it was close to $20 million.

Seattle-based iLike manages a Web site that scans a user’s music library and generates recommendations for other music the user might enjoy. It also makes a popular application for social networking sites such as Facebook that allows users of those sites to recommend music to their friends and find nearby concerts of their favorite artists.

ILike recently announced it would also launch a music download store to compete with Apple Inc.’s iTunes and Amazon.com Inc.

The acquisition is the first by MySpace under its new Chief Executive Owen Van Natta, who hopes iLife will help the Beverly Hills-based social networking site compete. MySpace, which is owned by News Corp., was once the largest social networking site in the world, but has since been surpassed by Facebook Inc.

“The iLike acquisition advances our relentless pursuit of innovation and the need to create new distributed social experiences in music and beyond,” Van Natta said in a statement.

By buying iLike, MySpace is also making a play to keep itself relevant in the Internet music space, one of the areas where it still holds an edge over Facebook. Along with the major record labels, MySpace co-owns MySpace Music, an extension of the social network site that allows users to stream music for free and provides a forum for artists and bands to post new music and videos.

MySpace Music is already one of the most popular music sites on the Web, and MySpace could potentially leverage iLike’s popularity and features to generate more traffic.