All morning we've been hearing whispered reports of a supposedly imminent buy-out of the iLike social media service by former social-media king MySpace. According to TechCrunch MySpace is very close to sealing the deal that will land them ownership of iLike for a cool $20 million.

This will be the virgin purchase for new MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, who has spent the last few months since his ascension looking for ways to recapture market share from more popular media outlets like Facebook and Twitter. Apparently Van Natta thinks that iLike has what MySpace needs to regain some lost popularity. If you've never used it, iLike is a music recommendation service with 50 million registered users. It keeps track of your favorite types of music and offers recommendations based on that data.

If this purchase goes through, iLike will replace MySpace Music and give the veteran social site a real pick-me-up in the battle with Facebook. The iLike service is currently the most-used music application on Facebook, which would make this coup for MySpace especially important.

There's been no independent confirmation of these rumors, but I think we can expect to see something solid on this transaction by Friday at the latest. This deal is supposed to go through before the end of the week.