[Posted on February 26, 2008 - 3:17 PM]
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You have to admire its ambition. While most digital music startups are targeting a niche area like ticketing or event listings, iLike is going after the whole shebang. iLike CEO Ali Partovi said yesterday at the San Fran MusicTech Summit, "The only company we view as a definitive competitor is MySpace Music." Whether MySpace feels the same way is unlikely, but the chances of iLike beating MySpace are heightened by the simple fact of having that as a goal. Partovi things iLike can beat News Corp.'s social networking giant in three ways:
- Syndication - Allows artists to post their information once and then publish it across the web via OpenSocial and other Open APIs. MySpace can't do that because it's focused on convincing people to visit its own web site.
- Friend Finder - iLike's recommendation engine actively helps artists and fans connect. MySpace puts the onus on artists to find their fans, which can add their favorite bands as friends. Surprisingly, it's working in some cases. U2 has 10 times more fans on iLike than it does on MySpace.
- Ease of Use - iLike's service is easier for artists and friends to manage right now. For example, artists on iLike avoid another step in the process by not needing to accept a friend request. However, Partovi concedes that MySpace Music may catch up soon.
This isn't a complete delusion. iLike, which has received funding from Ticketmaster and Khosla Ventures is growing quickly. Partovi said the company has 20 million registered users and offers its service to users of Facebook, Bebo, hi5 and MySpace. It will launch on Orkut next week. It also has a helpful iTunes plug-in. The distribution is leading to revenue. The Seattle company gets paid every time it refers someone to a site where that user buys something. Partovi said iLike is the number two referrer of traffic to Ticketmaster and a top four referrer of traffic iTunes.
One big question is whether success depends upon iLike.com becoming a destination site or whether the company can succeed in a big way primarily as a distributed service. Partovi and the other panelists on the Music and Social Networking panel yesterday seemed to agree that Facebook and MySpace were just "flavors of the month" and that it's better to be a widget maker. If they are banking on that happening anytime soon, they may be in for a long wait.
It seems to me that if more artists view iLike as one of the primary services to manage their online presence, iLike's distributed service will continue growing. And if enough users peel off of those platforms back to the easier to monetize iLike.com, Partovi could indeed reach his goal of beating MySpace Music. He boiled his strategy down to this: "We're taking down MySpace down one artist at a time." - Joshua Jaffe
Joshua Jaffe is general manager of TechConfidential.com.
