I was kinda thinking about the business of "fandom" being brought to a new level using Social Networks and that seems to be typified by a post about iLike in TechCrunch today titled iLike Launches Artist News Stream - Users Triple since Last July To 22 Million.
When you think about it Social Networks ought to enable the concept of "fans" by allowing more of a sense of community to take place online and more frequent updates on what Artists (musical artists, that is), who have fans, are doing:
"....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)."
I think one could go to extremes here - and that should be avoided - but the concept is sound (which makes sense since we're talking about musical artists).
Incidently, the traffic on iLike has been going up (a function of it's usefulness, no doubt):
"...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."
But here's the thing - I think the idea of a news feed can go beyond musical artists - it could include Actors, Authors (to some extent) Visual Artists (depending on how much of a fan base they have).
And how different is the news feed you get from iLike than what Facebook supplies to any member?
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