iLike Is Pretty Cool

A friend of mine at work and and I were chatting this morning about the classic problem of discovering new music. Low and behold, Web 2.0 to the rescue! Introducing iLike! iLike proclaims to have the following services.

• - social music discovery Discover and share playlists, new music that matches your tastes, and concerts by your favorite artists. The iLike Sidebar* scans your music library, recommends new music, and helps you connect musically with your friends and the broader iLike community. (*Windows Media Player support now available.)
• - artist services platform - Post Once, Publish Everywhere To learn more about iLike’s free suite of services to help artists build viral fan communities on Facebook and beyond, visit www.iLike.com/forartists. Also, see which leading artists use iLike Artist Services to reach their fans.
• - iLike on facebook Add music to your profile, discover concerts by your favorite artists, and see what music and concerts your friends like.
• - artist community Where ordinary listeners pick the hits. 1,000 radio partners. Take a quick tour of GarageBand.
• - broadcaster community Personal broadcasting made simple.

I have to say the concept seems right on. I have a terrible time discovering new music and socializing around music. The toolbar is kick butt. Unfortunately, I was only able to try it on my laptop which doesn’t have my music collection on it but it really integrated well.

The funny thing is that the only person in my gmail account that is a member of iLike is my friend Joe who is the co-founder of Flixster. And, at the bottom on each of the pages there is a strange advertisement for Flixster. I guess they have some sort of partnership in place.

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According to Crunchbase, the company was valued at $53.2 million in 2006 and then got a bunch of money from Ticketmaster.com (owned by IAC). (That’s probably the connection back to Flixster because it was reported that Flixster was in deep acquisition discussions with IAC a while back.) Also, take note of the amazing leadership team in place:

Overall. thumbs up. Let’s see if I can find some new music!