Keep an eye on yet-to-be launched Picadee, a new Seattle startup getting some buzz. The company was founded by former iLike employees Marcus Womack, Mike Bohlander, Ray Fortna and Josh Hepfer, and has taken a seed round of funding from iLike founders Ali Partovi and Hadi Partovi.
The company isn’t saying what it’s doing yet, but this is a team that has performed well together before. They built iLike (see our first coverage), which was eventually acquired by MySpace. iLike was the original “Facebook Music” app. – for a time it was by far the most popular third party application on Facebook. → Read More
If the new Ping sidebar that was launched today as a part of iTunes 10.0.1 looks familiar, perhaps it’s because you’ve been using the iLike Sidebar — an iTunes (and Windows Media Player) plug-in that does pretty much the same thing. We know at least one person finds the two very similar: Ali Partovi, the co-founder of iLike.
“I just hope Apple also copies iLike’s mission of democratizing music by empowering artists, especially the little guys. With Ping’s restrictions so far on artist signup, the major labels are the winners, not artists, and that breaks my heart,” Partovi told us today when asked about Ping’s newest feature. → Read More
When a service such as Facebook limits users’ creative freedom, it is inevitable that other add-on services will overcome this limitation. This is why then, we see more and more Facebook tab apps that give us more control and freedom when it comes to customizing a fan page or a personal profile.
I can’t really understand why Facebook doesn’t create an editor that lets users create a super fan page. I can only guess they don’t want to deal with it and prefer their uniform design, which may be boring but at least it is consistent and familiar. Instead, Facebook lets other people get creative and offer an array of Facebook related apps built on the API. In any case, you must know this by now: A personalized page can drive more attention and probably, more traffic to your brand. In this post, I just want to give you a clear picture about the best services that are out there, by gathering all the information in one place so it’s easier to save and use as needed. (Also check out AppBistro for more Facebook tab apps and reviews). → Read More
GarageBand.com, the well-known indie music store, discovery & review service and online community, will be discontinued as of July 15th, 2010, more than 10 years after it first saw the light of day.
In an email sent to users this morning, the company that spawned social music discovery service iLike (now part of MySpace), the GarageBand team says users can register for an iLike account to have their music, profile pic and bio automatically linked up and ported over. → Read More
Troubled social networking giant MySpace has lost another key executive with the recent departure of John Faith, until recently General Manager and Vice President of MySpace Mobile. His resignation hasn’t been announced yet (nor has his LinkedIn profile been updated), but we’ve confirmed hallway rumors that he jumped ship at the end of January 2010 both with the man in question and the company he used to work for.
Faith has moved to Austin, Texas – just in time for SXSW – where he has joined local startup WhaleShark Media as SVP of Engineering. → Read More
Of all the things Google has launched this past year, the most useful may be its Music Onebox feature that allows you to easily play popular music from Google Search results. Following its debut in October, I found myself using it left and right for songs I wanted to listen to. One thing I noticed was that while deals were in place with iLike, imeem, Rhapsody, and Pandora, the majority of the one-click play results were from the streaming music service Lala. This was awesome because most of the songs served up by Lala were the full versions. But fast forward to today, and it’s a much different story: Lala Onebox results are few and far between.
Why? It’s hard to know for sure, but it seems pretty likely that Apple’s recent deal to purchase Lala is at play. At the very least, it would seem that behind-the-scenes politics are dictating the results now being shown. We noted at the time of the Apple/Lala deal that it could change the Onebox offering, and it looks like it has. Plenty of results that used to serve up a Lala play option now default to iLike, which itself is now a part of MySpace Music (as is imeem). In fact, doing a random sampling of 30 popular songs brought yielded 28 iLike Onebox results, and only 2 Lala results. The problem with this is that for the majority of iLike Onebox results, you can only listen to either 30 or 90 second clips, rather than the entire songs, like you could on Lala. That obviously makes Google Music Onebox music much less useful. → Read More
Sometimes you have to apply the smell test to what your sources are telling you, and the rumors we’re hearing about Apple’s purchase of music service LaLa are definitely smelling a little off. $80 million for LaLa? That isn’t what we’re hearing.
LaLa was purchased for $17 million by Apple, according to our sources with indirect knowledge of the deal. And the company supposedly had $14 million in cash in the bank, meaning the actual purchase price was really $3 million.
That’s in line with recent competitive sales like iLike ($20 million) and iMeem ($1 million). LaLa had plenty of cash in the bank, but they were burning $500k/month, say our sources. There’s just no reason Apple would pay $80 million for the company.
We also believe that LaLa was acquired mostly for the star engineering team and the awesome recent Google deal more than for the product. iTunes in the cloud isn’t something we should hold our breath for. $3 million for top-of Google music results and a top team of engineers makes a lot of sense. $80 million not so much. → Read More
MySpace is in late stage negotiations to acquire music streaming service iMeem, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. MySpace is on a bit of an acquisition spree – they acquired iLike, another music service, three months ago.
The iMeem acquisition isn’t yet finalized, we’ve heard from sources, and awaits approval from various stakeholders.
We don’t know the price of the acquisition, but this isn’t going to be a big win for investors. iMeem has raised at least $25 million (that we’ve been able to track) plus at least another $10 million in debt. But the difficultly in making a free streaming music service work as a business model forced them to make some hard decisions. Earlier this year they renegotiated label contracts and recapitalized the company, bringing in $6 million in fresh capital.
iMeem found a way to survive a few more months. But now they’re under the financial gun again, we’ve heard, and investors aren’t willing to put more capital into the company. But MySpace is stepping in to acquire the company. → Read More
Did Facebook finally unfriend iLike? It certainly looks that way. Facebook is restricting iLike from showing people’s music data in their profiles (the songs and artists they like) or alerting them to upcoming concerts through Facebook notifications. The ban on notifications appears to be part of Facebook’s recent moves to fight app spam. It is not clear what music data specifically will be pulled from profiles, but that could cover all the data iLike collects about users—their music preferences and recommendations.
Even though iLike is the top music app on Facebook, with 12 million active monthly users, the two companies have been on the outs ever since iLike was picked up for a song by arch-rival MySpace. The recent deal with Google Music to show iLike/MySpace Music results added insult to injury. → Read More
Now that the dust is settling on the newly launched Google Music (if you don’t yet have it in your normal Google search results, you can use it here) that integrates LaLa and iLike/MySpace streaming music, all I can think of is this: What were Facebook and Ticketmaster thinking when they passed up the opportunity to acquire iLike?
MySpace is the big lottery winner here. They bought iLike for $20 million in August. What they got: a talented (literally) team that is starting to fill the executive ranks at MySpace, the biggest music application on Facebook, and, it turns out, a deal with Google that is now sending massive traffic flow directly to MySpace Music.
Our understanding from sources is that MySpace made an offer to iLike without knowing about the Google deal. Supposedly, since iLike was under NDA, all they knew was that iLike had a big partnership opportunity with some big company, nothing more. In hindsight the iLike deal looks smart even without Google. Add that in and it looks absolutely brilliant. I’m no fan of MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta, but I’ll give the man credit here. → Read More
TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid traveled down to Los Angeles earlier today to cover the launch of Google Music Onebox. In addition to his live notes from the event and the panel, he managed to point his camera at just about everyone involved in the new service: Google Director Product Management Search R.J. Pittman, MySpace Music President Courtney Holt and LaLa founder Bill Nguyen. Jason also recorded his own first demo of the product, which didn’t go so well based on the mouse and browser setup.
Key takeaways – Google will integrate new partners as it makes sense. And while MySpace knew about the negotiations between iLike and Google prior to announcing their acquisition of iLike in August, the deal was far from certain. More on that in a subsequent post.
All are below: → Read More
I’m here at Capitol Records in Hollywood, California for a special media event where Lala, MySpace, iLike, Google and others are officially announcing the launch of Google’s Music Onebox — a special new kind of Google search result that will let you instantly stream songs directly from Google’s results page. We first broke the news of the feature’s impending launch last week, though none of the companies involved have been willing to comment on it until now.
Here’s how the new feature will work: Onebox will let users stream songs directly from Google’s search result page, and will also include additional content like tour information and music videos (the actual content shown will vary depending on the partner — more on that later). Enter a query for “Use Somebody”, and you’re going to see a small ‘play’ button in your search result that lets you stream the Kings of Leon song in its entirety, or buy the song. Clicking on the play button will bring up a small browser window that will immediately start streaming your song. → Read More
None of the companies involved will confirm the new Google Music service – we have “no comments” or absolute silence from Google, LaLa, MySpace and iLike. But the new service is all but confirmed. And we have the screenshots showing how the service, which will be announced on October 28, will look to prove it.
Matt Ghering, a product marketing manager at Google, has been one of the people talking to the big four music labels about the new service, we’ve heard from one of our sources. And he has supposedly sent these screenshots of the look and feel of Google Music search to various rights holders and potential partners.
The first screenshot shows how a search result might look on Google for a search for “U2.” A picture of the band is to the left of four streaming options for various songs, and the user has the option of listening via either iLike or LaLa. Click on one of the results, and a player pops up from the services that streams the song, along with an option to purchase the song for download. → Read More
One thing about MySpace – they’ve always had far more colorful executives than the more buttoned up Facebook exec team. Of course, those partying and committing federal crimes days are history with the new team in place.
Or so we thought…
A new group of execs were brought in today. And among them are the cofounders of music startup iLike, Ali Partovi and Hadi Partovi. As usual, we peruse the MySpace profiles of new execs because every once in a while we find a new exec hire that hasn’t actually ever used the service.
All the new execs appear to have MySpace profiles. But just before I signed out of the last one i checked, Ali Partovi, a video he uploaded caught my eye. He says “Here’s a little video I just made for the MySpace sales conference next week (Oct 13-15). They told everybody, “make a video showing how MySpace is YOUR space”…..”
Anyway, meet your new SVP Business Development at MySpace, who is most definitely not buttoned up and boring. We’ve also added this video to his Crunchbase profile. Because we can never, ever let him live this down: → Read More
MySpace has just announced the appointment of four new members to its executive team, which saw a major shakeup last April. The new hires include Nada Stirratt, who will serve as Chief Revenue Officer and Dustin Finer, who is now Chief People Officer. Joining them will be iLike founders (and brothers) Ali Partovi, who is now SVP of Business Development based in San Francisco, and Hadi Partovi as SVP of Technology, based out of Seattle.
MySpace acquired streaming music service iLike in August for $20 million. → Read More
The ink isn’t even dry on the MySpace/iLike acquisition, and already Facebook has a new crush on a different music service, Spotify.
We’ve heard that Facebook has been talking with the European startup about a partnership for well over a year (about the time the Facebook music rumors heated up), but that the talks have intensified dramatically in the last week.
And just as we were digging into that rumor, up pops a Facebook status message from Mark Zuckerberg: “Spotify is so good.” → Read More
I’m a Web fanatic, I admit. But you probably already knew that… My work environment has been completely web based for years now. The same applies to my music. Like many people, I used to download music from Kazaa or eMule (Yeah, I know some of you still do). Most of the time now, I listen to music on the web and don’t have any need to download it. My laptop benefits the most from this inclination since it’s not weighed down by music files, thus saving me tons of space and virus headaches (you eMule users know what I’m talking about). Anyhow, if I do choose to download music, I can always do it over at iTunes or my favorite place in the web: Jamendo.
Music plays a large role in our lives. Since the web now plays an even bigger part, combining the two together has become unavoidable. The greatest thing about this powerful duo is that you don’t need to spend a lot of time searching for music you like — just use this nifty guide list and you’ll find just about everything you need to enjoy hours of good music. The sound quality changes from service to service, but overall, it’s good enough for regular web usage. → Read More
As expected, MySpace has confirmed that it bought iLike. It is not disclosing financial terms, but our information is that it was around $20 million.
During the conference call, Van Natta stressed the importance of music, open content distribution, and talent as the main drivers behind the deal. He also put to rest misinformed speculation that there was any delay in the deal due to tax issues or a canceled iLike board meeting. “I have been doing deals for 15 years now, and this was one of the smoother sailing deals,” says Van Natta.
Both iLike’s employees and management team will now work for MySpace, but will remain an autonomous unit based in Seattle. Throughout the conference call, Van Natta’s first, he stressed his desire to make MySpace as open as possible and he cast the iLike acquisition as complementary to MySpace in that it is a distributed application across many social networks. “People want to interact in many places. We will take that strategy and apply it across the Web,” he said. Later he reiterated, “The thrust of this is distributed web, how can we serve users in a more distributed way.”
The implication, of course, being that rival Facebook is not so open (although Mark Zuckerberg would beg to differ). Van Natta couldn’t hep but give his former employer a not-so-subtle dig: “We are a much more open network. People can explore each other interests, much more so than on other social networks.”
My full notes are below: → Read More
MySpace just sent out an advisory that it will be holding a press conference shortly at 11:45 PT.
CEO Owen Van Natta will be making an announcement (which , incidentally, will be his first public statement since taking over last April).
Could this be the official announcement that MySpace is buying iLike, the acquisition that got away from Facebook and Amazon? That’s our guess. Deal negotiations were progressing smoothly last we heard.
More details soon. We’ll be covering the announcement live. → Read More
There’s lots of speculation out there on the yet-to-be-closed MySpace acquisition of iLike that we first reported on Monday.
Much of that speculation is factually incorrect, we’ve confirmed from a source close the the deal. iLike, which has been profitable for over a year, had multiple offers to be acquired.
Our source says that, in addition to MySpace’s offer, both Facebook and Amazon submitted bona fide written offers to buy the company. At least one other large company expressed interest to Allen & Company, iLike’s advisors to the deal.
Activision Blizzard and Microsoft have been incorrectly rumored to have been seriously interested in the company, however. → Read More
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