iLike And MySpace To Make Beautiful Music Together
iLike's sidebar for iTunes and Windows Media Player enables users to offer suggestions for new music, creates automatic, personalized playlists through its "artist-fan graph," a database of connections between consumers and their favorite artists. The site also provides musicians and music labels with a Universal Artist dashboard to connect to fans across other social networking sites.
The wildly popular three-year-old music application has 55 million total users and 1.5 billion monthly impressions, thanks to its presence on sites including Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 and iGoogle. iLike also runs an indie music site, GarageBand.com.
iLike also offers retail links to iTunes and Amazon.com to purchase music, to Ticketmaster to buy concert tickets and to Thumbplay for ringtones. Ticketmaster is a major shareholder of the company.
The iLike purchase will give MySpace a sorely needed shot in the arm as the company has seen increased competition from rival social networking sites such as Facebook. In fact, a lagging user base prompted MySpace to lay off 30 percent of its workforce in June.
"The iLike acquisition advances our relentless pursuit of innovation and the need to create new distributed social experiences in music and beyond," said Owen Van Natta, MySpace CEO, in a statement.
iLike's Seattle-based management team, including CEO Ali Partovi, President Hadi Partovi and CTO Nat Brown, will continue to run the company.