As more details emerge about the MySpace-iLike acquisition, all sorts of interesting observations and questions pop up. A few thoughts:
The Facebook Angle
This is by far the most interesting angle to the deal. iLike is the most popular music application on Facebook, and is the de facto Facebook Music app. That company will shortly be owned by MySpace, Facebook’s primary competitor. That puts Facebook in a lose-lose situation. They can let iLike continue to dominate the music scene on Facebook and let MySpace own all that. Or they can ban iLike and lose all credibility with their platform – everyone would know iLike was banned because of the acquisition by MySpace. And it doesn’t have to be an outright ban. Facebook has plenty of subtle ways of trainwrecking an application they don’t like. Keep an eye on this.
Why didn’t Facebook just buy iLike? A matching or slightly better offer than the $20 million MySpace is paying would likely have gotten the deal done. And it may have saved Facebook from an embarrassing situation.
If I were MySpace, I’d focus on getting their free streaming music into the iLike Facebook application as soon as possible. Advertisers will love it. → Read More
MySpace is close to acquiring popular social music service iLike, we’ve confirmed with multiple sources. The deal, which should close this week, will be MySpace’s first acquisition since new CEO Owen Van Natta took control of the company in April 2009. The price is “around $20 million.”
iLike, which launched in late 2006, is a social music recommendation service that now has more than 50 million registered users. It tracks what you listen to and like and gives you recommendations on new music based on that data as well as what your friends are listening to. It is the top music application on Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 and just about every other social network other than MySpace, which has MySpace Music. → Read More
Popular music recommendation service iLike launched a music download service this afternoon, offering users MP3 downloads for $0.89 to $1.29 per song. Previously the service only offered users the ability to sample 30 second clips of songs, or restricted full streaming via a partnership with Rhapsody (now phased out).
iLike says the first song purchased today was Get Away, Jordan by Ernie Haase & Signature Sound. Music is available from all four major labels and “hundreds of indie labels, enabled via MediaNet.”
Rumors of the music store were first reported by CNET’s Greg Sandoval last month. Until now iLike has offered downloads from Amazon and iTunes. Those options remain.
The service is rolling out now on iLike (I was able to purchase a song), and should be available to all U.S. users by end of day, says iLike. iLike applications on iGoogle, Facebook, Bebo and other platforms will also be available “soon” says the company for U.S. users.
In an email exchange, iLike CEO Ali Partovi said: → Read More
iLike is launching a new iPhone application today that takes advantage of the iPhone 3.0 update’s new features in some of the best ways that we’ve seen yet. Dubbed “Local Concerts”, the application lets you follow any artist you’d like and receive alerts whenever they announce that they’re coming to a local venue. For anyone who has ever tried to keep tabs on their local music scene, this is going to be a must-have. You can grab the free app here.
Using the app is pretty straightforward: it allows you to view all venues in your area, with concert listings for events that are going on in the near future or further down the line. But it also includes a number of nifty features that the iPhone didn’t previously support. One of these is automated personalization — the application can look at your iPhone or iPod Touch’s library, and determine which artists you should probably be following (though you’re free to adjust the list on your own). Once you’ve found a concert you’d like to attend, the app includes links to sites where you can purchase tickets. Whenever you’ve got an alert, you’ll see a message pop up on your iPhone (much like an SMS message would) regardless of if you have the application open. → Read More
We’ve confirmed from multiple sources that San Francisco/Seattle based music service iLike, which has been profitable since 2008, is raising new capital in an unusual transaction designed to push out Ticketmaster, an investor since 2006.
The company has raised a total of $16.5 million from the founders, Scott Banister, Bob Pittman, Vinod Khosla and Ticketmaster to date. But their last round of funding was in 2006, where Ticketmaster put the bulk of the capital in via a third round of financing that valued the company at a whopping $53.2 million. → Read More
iLike, the popular music discovery site with a huge presence on social networks, is launching a set of new syndication services for musicians. Beginning tonight, iLike now offers extensive integration with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, allowing artists to distribute content to each of their online presences from a single control panel. In addition to these, the company is also launching a new self-serve platform for building customized iPhone applications for artists, allowing them to establish themselves on the App Store with a minimum amount of effort and resources.
While most readers probably associate iLike with music playlists and streaming, the service is also home to 300,000 artists who use its services to help manage and distrbute their content. Before today’s annoucement, the service offered more limited syndication options, allowing them send data through the iLike Facebook application, its iGoogle widget, and an iTunes plugin. But the new options go much further. → Read More
Today, iLike released a social playlist app that lets you create a music playlsit and embed it on any Website. Then through Friend Connect, anyone can sign in and change or add to the playlist. I’ve embedded one below seeded with five songs that I’ve called TechCrunch House Party. Go ahead and add to it, but only good songs, please. Or create your own. → Read More
Facebook’s ongoing effort to launch a free streaming music service is stalled, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation. The company was close to a deal that would bring free streaming music from three of the four big labels (Universal, Sony, EMI) through the Total Music joint venture. But the deal stalled when the lone holdout, Warner Music, refused to participate.
Through most of 2008 Facebook said on and off record that they had no real interest in their own music application and that third parties like iLike could continue to build their Facebook music applications without fear of competition directly from Facebook.
News leaked in the Fall, though, that Facebook had approached a number of third parties to power the official Facebook music application: → Read More
MOG demo’d the next version of their popular music service to me today, and I was impressed. It combines a best of breed interface with free on demand streaming and a Pandora-like music recommendation engine. The trouble is, it may never launch because only two of the four major music labels are supporting it so far.
MOG has a history of doing cool new things around music. The service today includes a media player plugin that records and analyzes your music habits, a website that has a dedicated page for every artist, album and song with user generated reviews and posts, and an advertising network that provides revenue for 300 top music blogs. Users can also stream music via an excellent front end to Rhapsody.
All of that brings about 5 million unique visitors a month to their network, and the company says they should bring in about $5 million in revenue in 2009. → Read More
Indie music download subscription service eMusic is getting an overhaul. Individual artist an dalbum pages already have more of an AJaxy feel and incorporate YouTube videos and Flickr photos. On Friday, its homepage switched over to a new design centered around a new recommendation engine powered by MediaUnbound. Now, when you sign in as a member, you are presented with a grid of “Music You’ll Love” made up of personalized recommendations. You can also sort by “New Arrivals,” which tries to give you new music that you will like, as well as standard “Best Sellers” and “New and Noteworthy” albums selected by eMusic’s editorial staff.
Helping members find new music they will love is the key to eMusic’s business, and it needs to do a better job. eMusic has 400,000 paying subscribers who have downloaded 250 million songs since 2003. Members can download anywhere from 30 to 75 tracks a month before they have to start paying on a per track basis. Once people stop finding new music they want, they are more likely to cancel their subscriptions. Better recommendations would reduce that churn. → Read More
Despite our bumpy history with TuneCore, we’re big fans of their business model: they help artists get digital distribution of their music on iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, napster, eMusic and other online music sites without the trouble of going through a distributor. A recent deal with iLike expands their footprint further.
Basically, TuneCore is the place to go if you are unsigned but want people to have access to your music – a sort of CDBaby for the digital world. After a small setup fee, the artist keeps all proceeds from the sale.
This model has also attracted established artists who’ve ended their label deals to the platform, too. Jay-Z, Keith Richards, Public Enemy, Nine Inch Nails, Ricky Skaggs, Paul Westerberg, MGM Studios, Warren G, Bjork, Moby, High School Musical cast members, Ali Lohan, Cirque Du Soleil, Starbucks, Joan Jett, Rockstar Games, David Byrne, MGMT and others use TuneCore today. → Read More
Popular music service iLike has teamed with TuneCore, a music distribution platform, to help artists promote and sell their music as easily as possible.
TuneCore (whose CEO thankfully seems to have stopped handling the site’s PR) actually has an intriguing business model. For a flat fee, TuneCore will help artists distribute their digital music to a collection of music stores that the company has forged deals with including Rhapsody, Amazon MP3, and iTunes. Prices vary depending on how many stores you wish to reach and if you’d like to sell a single song or an entire album, but they are very affordable and bands keep 100% of revenue (you can see the pricing guide here).
While TuneCore isn’t introducing many new features with the iLike tie-in (it has offered the service independently for some time), its increased exposure makes sense for both sites. iLike has geared itself as a platform for artists to promote themselves on Rhapsody as well as a variety of social networks like Facebook and hi5. Giving artists an easy way to sell their music is the next logical step. → Read More
Seattle based iLike just expanded their recent streaming music deal with Rhapsody to allow any website or web application to add streaming music to their sites. Integration is dead simple (I’ve done it below). A long list of partners launches with them, including Google, Evite, TypePad, SGN, Flixster, Watercooler, Connected Weddings, Slide and Mesmo TV.
The big hook here is that it’s dead simple for developers to add simple playlists to their apps. The music is served up via straight HTML and Javascript, not the usual Flash widgets. Listeners can create, edit and listen to playlists without any registration with iLike. The only limitations are those imposed by Rhapsody, which limit any individual to just 25 song listens per month. After that, they have to pay for a $13/month account. → Read More
Facebook is now the largest social network in the world. But they continue to trail MySpace by a massive 36 million users in the U.S., and at current growth rates it will take them 18 years to overtake them. Most of Facebook’s growth is international, where they’ve executed on a brilliant strategy for quickly rolling out localized versions of sites by getting their users to do the translation work for them (MySpace, by contrast, expands via a command-and-control infrastructure that puts people on the ground in each new international market). But the commercial value of some of those international users is far less than the U.S., the UK, Japan and a handful of other countries with robust online advertising markets. Is Music Perpetuating MySpace’s Lead In The U.S.? Music is MySpace’s territory. They host millions of artist and band pages, and one of the first things any new band does is create their MySpace page. MySpace says 35 million people per month visit their music sites, including MySpace Music and various artist pages. Some artists have millions of “friends” and the pages allow streaming music, artist control over the look and feel of the site, etc. Facebook, by contrast, has no real internal music strategy. Artists can set up Pages to promote themselves, but the pages are no different to any other fan pages (for example, no streaming music) – there is nothing music or artist specific on the site. Next month MySpace is rolling out a new music joint venture with the major labels that will have music streaming, playlists, downloads, merchandise sales, ring tones and other features. It’s not only likely to be a major destination site for music but also a significant revenue driver for MySpace and the labels (a little may trickle down to the artists as well). Music is a huge part of what drove historical MySpace growth, and I believe it is a major factor in perpetuating their lead over Facebook in the U.S. market. Facebook’s Response To MySpace Music: iLike Facebook doesn’t appear to be engaging in any direct music strategy at all. Instead, they’ve placed their bet on iLike, a third party application that has no streaming deal (they piggyback on Rhapsody). Last month Facebook announced that they’ll give iLike special access to Facebook through their new Great Apps program. All official and most off record messaging we’re hearing is that iLike → Read More
The TechCrunch team is on site at the Facebook Developer conference, and we’ll be live blogging the news. Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote starts at 1:30 pm PST. Facebook’s press release is here. Live Coverage In a press briefing after the keynote, Zuckerberg stated “I wish I knew” when asked when the anticipated payments system would launch. He also hinted that Facebook is working on launching improved search, but they aren’t close to launching it yet. 2:49 PM: That’s it. The show is over. 2:48 PM: Great Apps can integrate with users just like native Facebook apps, and they get early access to features. The Great Apps program is in alpha stage and the first two partners are iLike and Causes. There will be a strong enforcement system with all apps, and they will disable apps that are a problem. Over the last year they’ve disabled apps for violation of privacy or other policies. They take this very seriously, he says. 2:47 PM: The second announcement is the Facebook Great Apps Program (Top Tier program). They embody all ten of the guiding principles, and they advance the mission of Facebook. → Read More
Update: Our live notes from Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote are here. Today is definitely Facebook day as they hold their second annual F8 developers conference in San Francisco. Last year they released their developer platform, which led competitors to hurriedly release their own competing offerings. What’s in store for tomorrow? We’ve made our predictions, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes the stage at 1:30 to make his keynote, and workshops will follow all day after that. The full schedule is here. Some of the news is breaking early. For example, we will almost certainly see the Facebook payments platform launch in some form, for example – Facebook desperately wants to find a way to help application developers make money beyond advertising, and the iPhone App Store has shown that people are willing to pay for quality applications. Even more certain is the launch of Facebook Connect, which will allow third party services to authenticate Facebook users and merge profile data into their offerings. Digg will be one of their launch partners, and will show off the new product on stage, say our sources. However, neither CEO Jay Adelson or Founder Kevin Rose will attend the event. We’ve also heard from sources that Facebook will announce a tiering system for applications, confirming our previous post in March. Five to ten top tier apps, which have proven themselves trustworthy and which create as good or better a user experience as what Facebook is able to create itself, will be named in the near future. iLike (music) and Causes (charity) will be announced tomorrow, and more will come soon. We heard that Flixster (movies) was on the short list but was bumped at the last minute – perhaps due to their MySpace partnership announced yesterday. Other apps will be grouped into a middle tier, where most of them will fall, and a bottom “unwashed masses” tier for untrustworthy or spammy apps that have little user value. Each tier will have different rules for engaging with users, particularly around invites, messaging and entry into the news feed. CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
iLike, the music service with a massive following on Facebook and increasing popularity elsewhere, has introduced full-song playback on its flagship site, iLike.com. Through its partnership with music subscription service Rhapsody, the site will be offering over 5 million songs from all of the major labels and a variety of indie artists, too. In conjunction with the launch of full song playback, the site is also launching a new self-serve ad platform for concert promoters. Unfortunately, the full-song playback will be partially restricted for users that aren’t Rhapsody subscribers. Non-subscribers will only be able to listen to a maximum of 25 songs per month, while Rhapsody users under the service’s $12.99 monthly plan will be able to listen to an unlimited number of songs. iLike competitor Last.fm began offering less restrictive playback options in January, but has had issues with keeping its content-providers satisfied (Warner Music Group pulled out of the deal in June). The new ad-platform, which also launches today, is designed to give concert promoters a way to create feature-rich ads without much effort or technical know-how. Ads will be distributed across iLike’s network (namely their website and social network applications), and will display content depending on a user’s geographical location. On social networks, the ads will also include elements like “invite your friends” and “see who’s going”. iLike has also announced plans for a new developer platform that will be launching in the near future (likely in the next few weeks). While iLike has offered widgets for syndication in the past, the new platform will allow developers to customize their own web applications. CrunchBase Information iLike Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
MOG has announced that it received a $2.8M strategic investment from Universal Music Group and The Angels’ Forum. We’ve also heard that Sony BMG was also part of the round, which means two major record labels have come together to invest in the same online music venture. Music afficianados can use MOG to blog about their favorite artists and tracks. It also provides software that detects which songs you play on your computer (regardless of the media player you use) and shares your listening habits with friends on the site. This software is not a plugin like iLike’s but a standalone client that runs in the background. Since December, Rhapsody has also integrated with the service, allowing MOG users with Rhapsody accounts to play songs mentioned on MOG directly from blog posts. This strategic investment hopefully will mean that we’ll see even more music delivered through MOG, perhaps eventually a free streaming service for everyone regardless of their Rhapsody status (just speculation at this point). This would align their service more with the Imeem model of providing free ad-supported, and label-sanctioned, music. CrunchBase Information MOG Imeem iLike Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
As music CD sales plummet and the long term price of recorded music trends towards free, live music will evolve from being a way to market new album releases to quite possibly the primary income stream for most artists – even the big ones. That’s why services like iLike, which determine your favorite music based on your iTunes listening habits and then tell you about upcoming concerts for those artists, are on the rise. Relative newcomer Songkick goes even further – it makes educated guesses about what music you’ll like that you may not have heard before, and then suggests local live shows for you to attend. Songkick founder Ian Hogarth says that 70% of U.S. adults attend a live music show every year, but we collectively spend 35 times as much on going to movies as we do on concerts. There is a big opportunity to increase the size of the market, he says. but people need more information on who’s performing, where, and when. We first covered them at launch last year, and we also mentioned their “Alexa For Bands” project recently. Today though they’re releasing new functionality and also announcing a round of financing. Songkick focuses on artists that are still alive (dead artists tend not to go on tour) – they’re tracking about 1 million of them in their database. Users can get recommendations on the Songkick site or via an iTunes plugin (Windows and Mac). And now Songkick is making their database available to partners. Larger partners can access the data via their API (music search engine SeeqPod does this). And smaller sites (music blogs, for example), can add upcoming concerts about artists they’re discussing to their blog posts and other content via a new “BandSense” product that auto-determines band names and inserts links to upcoming concerts. API partners split revenue with Songkick 50/50. Blogs and smaller sites get 100% of the revenue for now. Songkick was originally a Y Combinator startup and took a small amount of financing. Today they are announcing a second round, from The Accelerator Group and SoftTech VC. The company was founded by Ian Hogarth, Pete Smith and Michelle You. CrunchBase Information Songkick Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Rumors surfaced again yesterday on Billboard and today in other media outlets that Facebook is in talks with the record labels to launch a music service that will include either free ad-supported music streams or paid downloads. Talk of such a service started last October, but what Facebook ended up launching was simply artist fan pages. MySpace is also preparing its own music service to be called MySpace Music. And other competitors from imeem to iLike to Last.fm are putting pressure on Facebook to respond with its own music offering. Music drives many social interactions, so you can see why Facebook would want to own that area even at the risk of alienating key partners (such as iLike). But Facebook should really stay out of the music business. If it tries to enter in a big way it risks alienating not just its partners, but musicians as well. Its fan pages for musicians have not really done that well. Look at 50 Cent’s official Facebook page. He’s only gathered 8,213 fans there, compared to his 1,918,372 fans on his iLike page on Facebook (which includes fans across other social networks as well). I noted a similar disparity shortly after Facebook first launched its music fan pages. In fact, 50 Cent already dissed Facebook once. He took down his official Facebook page for at least a couple months. It just recently went up again. His online efforts are geared towards driving as much traffic to his own fan site that he controls, This is 50. That is why fan widgets like iLike or Kyte.tv appeal to him more than tying himself to any one destination. As iLike CEO Ali Partovi likes to say, “The new opportunity for growth is beyond Facebook.” Partovi just announced this morning that iLike has 23 million users keeping track of 200,000 artists across Facebook, Hi5, Bebo, iLike.com, Ask, and even iTunes. What is happening with 50 Cent is indicative of a bigger battle brewing in the music industry between artists and record labels over who will get to control future online revenues. Both record labels and artists did not like the fact that MySpace was making money off of their artist pages with ads, so they started negotiating deals to get a cut of the action. The prospect of Facebook becoming a competitor was welcomed because Facebook treats artist pages like any brand or canvas page. → Read More
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