San Francisco/Seattle based music service iLike launched a “news feed” for favorite artists this week. Users can now see exactly what their favorite artists are up to – when they go on tour, release new songs or videos, etc, the news is presented to them in the feed.
Users can select their favorite artist via the iLike website or on their social network applications. Or the service decides what you like based on your playing habits on iTunes (they have an iTunes plugin – if you listen to a song ten times, it thinks you like the artist).
The news feed for favorite artists can be viewed via the iTunes plugin, the website, the social network applications, or via a new iPhone app (just go to iLike on an iPhone and log in).
The company continues to dominate the Facebook music scene. Their U2 page on Facebook has 1.9 million fans. Compare that to just 168,000 friends on the MySpace U2 page, and 933,000 on Last.fm. The fact that a previously unreleased U2 song was first heard on iLike didn’t hurt those numbers, either.
In July 2007 iLike had 4.5 million users of its Facebook application. Today they have 14 million. But more than half of their new members today are coming from their iLike.com site and other social networks – OpenSocial gave them access to Bebo, Hi5 and soon MySpace. On their website alone they see 3.5 million worldwide monthly visitors, which isn’t bad considering most users interact with iLike via their iTunes plugin, or on Facebook and other social networks. Last.fm, which was acquired last year for $280 million, has 4.7 million.