After the earlier
discussion on Last.fm, I have been digging around for more dirt on social music sharing. The worst thing about iTunes, to me, is the disregard to the social web on which it flourishes. Just placing a subscribe via iTunes link is a pain. They don't cater at all to the social music user.
With iLike, an iTunes add in, that all may be about to change.
iLike is a service that's been created simply to share your musical tastes and find additional music you might like.
Mossberg took
iLike for a test drive (I tried but the site was down):
We downloaded iLike on various computers and were pleased, overall, with how it worked. It studies your entire music library and your listening -- not buying -- habits before suggesting related songs. It shows you what your friends are currently listening to and sets up a Web site where your music tastes are organized for others to see, encouraging social networking according to your music compatibility with other users.
Then, Influx interviewed the CEO. On
MySpace's early social music roots:
While a lot of people criticize MySpace for one reason or another, I think it's a fantastic service, and it's success is an incredible phenomenon. I think MySpace is still very much about music. However, I think the "music discovery" experience on Myspace could be made more effective -- as it is, you discover music either by total accident (stumbling on a friend's page and a song plays) or by spam (bands contact you out of the blue). MySpace's popularity shows how great the user demand is for discovering music via friends. We believe iLike makes that even easier and more direct, by directly telling you what your friends have on their iPods.
When their site comes back to life give them a try. I can't wait to see if they can help me find more of the indy-sound that I like.
Hey, this is Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike & GarageBand.com.
Just wanted to let you know, the outage this morning is over. Please check out www.iLike.com and tell us what you think!
Ali
p.s. our outage today was due to an unexpected power outage at our network provider, AboveNet. (We were pretty upset and surprised, since AboveNet is also the provider for YouTube we expected better service, and based on our experience we don't advise anybody else to use AboveNet if you expect reliable service!)
Posted by: Ali Partovi | October 31, 2006 5:58 PM | Permalink to Comment