What is there not to Like?
By AZAM on March 5, 2008The twin power duo of Ali & Hadi Partovi are behind iLike. And frankly, there is not much not to like about the company and future potential. iLike is a service that is geared towards music listening has the ability to act as plugin to your favorite social network. The technology allows users to create personalized playlist and share music tastes among friends. The company founded in 2001 by Ali from his company Garageband.com which evolved into something more interesting to like. Besides its own wen site, iLike user based has grown at a viral pace from a Apple iTunes side bar on to face book and now available on other social networks: myspace, hi5, bebo,ning, opensocial, and likely many more.
iLike is social music discovery and artist platform to reach to larger user fan base across various mediums such as social networking sites. iLike through it site and plugin for various social networking sites offers an interactive way for users to discover music and share on social networks. In addition, iLike serves as a platform for artist to reach large fan based across a number of social networks to update fans with recent releases, concerts, and latest news to their fans base.
As the result of technology, the music industry is rapidly changing with the advent of digital music content. Digital music has made music content widely available and leading to decreasing sales of physical format of CDs. The music industry and the artists need to reach their audience in a new manner to offset declining music sales and offer a better value proposition for users to engage and part with their money.
Music is a common denominator among users and is heavily consumed digital music content on line. Widespread consumption can be seen in use on social networking site such as MySpace and YouTube for example. Despite large amount of consumption of music content, the music industry have yet found a way to capitalize and/or monetize in a major way the demand for music. The RIAA has been reluctant and defensive in posture towards changes in technology and the industry. Apple has been quite effective in the new digital music industry with the iPod and iTunes for distribution. At the same time, the overall industry is decreasing with lack of alternative business models that would prove effective in increasing revenues in the industry.
Social network seem to be the new platforms to reach a wide and highly specific target audience. In particular, facebook is mentioned to be the platform of the future with its user base of real individuals and their micro social networks of friends. The friend circle is the hotbed of activity of sharing and communicating preferences among each other. The social networks provide a perfect platform for viral applications and content to spread at amazing rates for adoption and consumption. The plugin itself becomes a powerful tool with a large audience and user base with well define demographic and preferences well defined. The combination is music to the ears of advertisers and offers a valuable proposition to all parties involved.
Thast what I like
iLike, the leading social music discovery service, today announced that more than 200,000 musicians and 23M users. The numbers are quite impressive and will likely continue to grow at fast pace. The team behind iLike is equally impressive and could be described as Rock Stars of the industry.
Directors
Jerry Harrison, Talking Heads producer
Sean Moriarty, President Ticket Master
Fred Davis , Entertainment Lawyer For Artist & Digital Music Companies
Marc Bondnick, Elevation Partners
Mark Sugarman, MHS Capital
Advisory Board
George Martin , Beatles producer
Bob Pittman, MTV founder
Vinod Khosla, VC & SUN co founder
David Goldberg, Head of Yahoo Music
Jenifer Leimgruber, Clear Channel
Dominic Sandifer, TBA Advertising
Tags : apple, Digital Music, Elevation Partners, Facebook, iLike, iTunes, MySpace