iLike Brings Free Indy Music to iTunes Recommendations

October 24th, 2006 at 10:45 pm

How could you say people don’t want music by unsigned artists? Have you heard of MySpace? Heck, Wired even says “Radio is dead” because they don’t have enough new music by the kind of musicians that are breaking on the Internet

October 25th, 2006 at 12:00 am

Robert: I believe he was saying that people don’t want subpar songs, and unfortunately independent artists are many, and the greater number means it is harder to find quality songs.

I’m all for discovering new, unsigned bands, and you’ll find a very large percentage of indie rock/pop in my huge song collection. However, there’s a lot of crap to wade through to find the true gems by independent artists, which is unfortunate. Now if iLike were to have a rating system (or GarageBand) and set a filter to only show those with a good rating, perhaps this will work out nice, but that would likely also limit the amount of free songs they could offer during recommendations.

October 25th, 2006 at 2:06 am

Hey there, I’m the CEO of iLike.com (and GarageBand).

In reply to Matt Burris (”Now if iLike were to have a rating system and set a filter to only show those with a good rating…”): That’s *exactly* what iLike has: a giant community, GarageBand.com, where listeners rate and tag thousands of songs. Only the top-rated songs are recommended by iLike.

Not all music is good, just as not all blogs are good. But add community filtering to find the gems that match my personal tastes, and it’s a different story. Try it and judge for yourself.

Unfortunately, the TechCrunch writer didn’t judge the music. Instead he hypothesized about “lower production quality” and jumped to conclude, “I’m not sure that free music from indendent musicians is a viable mass market value proposition.”

I was also dismayed that TechCrunch focused on “free indy music” and skipped over iLike’s primary function: its social features.* iLike’s primary goal is to facilitate discovering music through your friends. For example, iLike is the only service that lets you easily see “what are my friends listening to that I don’t have?”

Ultimately, I think finding new music based on what our friends are listening to may be more effective than any recommendation system — and certainly more effective than letting the major labels tell us what to like, as the TechCrunch writer would apparently have us do.

all the best,

Ali Partovi
CEO, iLike.com

* (Note: The writer did commend iLike’s “drag and drop manual recommendations to friends” — but this feature doesn’t actually exist in iLike, or any iTunes plugin for that matter.)

October 25th, 2006 at 6:36 am

reminds me of http://blog.wired.com/music/20.....ml#listen1

October 25th, 2006 at 9:41 am

So when will Apple start going after web sites and products with “i” as a prefix like they are doing with “Pod”? Can you go for a trademark of “i”

October 25th, 2006 at 8:24 pm

Indy as in the Indy 500???? Ooooohhhh, you mean indie….

October 27th, 2006 at 4:25 pm

I disagree with Marshall.

I like ‘iLike”.

The only problem I have with it is that it is tied 100% to Garage Band. Why not open that up, Ali? We at http://www.projectopus.com would love to be a part of iLike, as would purevolume I am sure, et al. You have someting useful and clueful here, don’t muck it up by keeping it closed.

January 17th, 2007 at 5:39 pm

Hi all,

I am the CEO of http://www.pixpix.net. PixPix.net also do social music network through friends. I am glad that there are a lot of push in this direction. We all should push toward a fair playing field where famous artist are competing at an equal playing field with independent musicians. I am still not sure if the friend recommend thing will work because my friend and I have very different taste in music. It may be better to build a community that weed out all the poor music. The rest is decent music that we all can listen to depending on our mood.

By the way Ali, great idea on the iTunes plug-in. Maybe we will build one too.

Nick