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December 19, 2006

Scoop: TicketMaster Pours $13.3 Million Into iLike

Michael Arrington

38 comments »

In about an hour, we hear, iLike and TicketMaster will announce a strategic agreement that includes a $13.3 million investment in iLike for 25% of the company.

That puts the value of iLike at a whopping $53.2 million. The company launched less than two months ago, on October 25.

We love the iLike service, which provides an excellent iTunes plugin that constantly analyzes what music you listen to and recommends new stuff. But what I don’t want to see is a “buy tickets” button next to each artist, effectively turning iTunes into a billboard. It’s not clear that’s what the companies intend to do, though. All they are saying now is that the agreement will “enable iLike to extend its reach while enabling Ticketmaster to engage consumers with deeply-integrated music and event discovery services intended to drive ticket sales.”

Previous investors in iLike include Khosla Ventures and Bob Pittman.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 at 5:23 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Drew Olanoff

    December 19th, 2006 at 5:46 pm

    ILike it.

  2. Will

    December 19th, 2006 at 6:06 pm

    Why remove comments when a typo is corrected?

  3. Peter

    December 19th, 2006 at 6:07 pm

    pours

  4. Mike

    December 19th, 2006 at 6:08 pm

    This is cool. I like Mike’s rec., but am unsure that it would be very useful…

    I just signed up for an account w/ ILike, and am curious to see how it compares to the iTunes plug-in I have been using to date: “SoundFlavor” (see: http://www.soundflavor.com ).

    SoundFlavor is like Pandora, but only reccomends songs in your own library. It also operates as a music buying engine, by reccommending songs to buy based on your library.

  5. Matt

    December 19th, 2006 at 6:17 pm

    I’ve been using the ontour dashboard widget (http://www.lfstyl.com/blog/2006/12/2/ontour-dashboard-widget.html) and I’ve really liked it.

    Last.FM has a good model for suggesting music. I like it better than pandora because of the social recommendation aspect to it.

    As for iLike, what I would like to see is a way to track all the concerts I’ve been incorporated into a music recommendation service. Also, it’d be great if I could pick up live recordings / setlists / photos from those concerts.

    Also, if there was a way to put in my credit card information and have the application pick up tickets for me. I’ve slept through the Saturday 9:00 AM sales time for a lot of events, only to find out that they sold out by 9:03.

    The problem with these concert suggestion services is that it doesn’t hit me when I’m listening to music. I don’t want to run another invasive program in the background unless it’s going to give me some solid services.

  6. Mike

    December 19th, 2006 at 6:32 pm

    Not bad. But as each of music service provide unique experiences, I have to use all of them, iTunes, Shoutcast, Last.fm, Pandora, iLike, eDonkey….
    Do I really need so many apps, just for listening to some songs?

    Tech Tutorials: http://www.hotcoding.com

  7. Jon

    December 19th, 2006 at 6:32 pm

    Makes you wonder what is the quickest way to becoming a millionaire, lottery tickets or a dynamic website ;-)

    Jon

  8. The Web Conferencing Blog

    December 19th, 2006 at 6:35 pm

    If Vinod is backing iLike, odds are that it’s going to be a very successful company. That guy has a unreal track record. Everything he touches turns to goal.

    http://davidchao.typepad.com

  9. Ben Strackany

    December 19th, 2006 at 6:50 pm

    No wonder he’s so good at soccer.

  10. PJ

    December 19th, 2006 at 6:59 pm

    I would love a “Buy Tickets” button next to my artists. Or better yet, just one hide-able button in the Mini-Store.

    iTunes as iTicket - give them $1 per sale. Simple. Beautiful.

  11. Dave Donohue

    December 19th, 2006 at 7:05 pm

    I like the concept, and the idea that mp3s are given away for free based on what’s currently being listened to is interesting.

    The site is definitely suffering from the TechCrunch effect - or some other side effect of today’s coverage.

  12. Steven Ickman

    December 19th, 2006 at 7:22 pm

    I agree with PJ…

    If you have to show ads, why not show something useful like the fact a band I like has an upcoming concert? Ticket Master already tries to do this but it doesn’t work very well because they don’t really know what music I listen to, just the concerts I go to. So I always seems to find out about some concerts after the fact.

    They have a way for me to tell them the bands I like but then I have to maintain this information in at least two places. They should just watch the music I listen to assuming I give them permission to do so…

    -Steve

  13. Tom

    December 19th, 2006 at 8:20 pm

    They need to lock down Borat as a spokesman asap.

  14. jonesy

    December 19th, 2006 at 8:30 pm

    ILike is yet another rec service; great…but I already have 5! Its a nice feature for TicketMaster, if I were LiveNation I would be very concerned, its an endgame around them.

  15. jorge

    December 19th, 2006 at 10:17 pm

    what Tom said was hilarious.

    i’ve been using last.fm for some time now but am willing to check out other sites that recommend music. not too sure how i feel about ticektmaster getting involved though. I agree with you Arrington.. I dont want a site where it says “buy tickets” next to everything.

  16. dave dvorak

    December 20th, 2006 at 3:48 am

    Ticketmaster have done the right thing by getting involved in a space like this - I hope it pays off for them. And I hope iLike users like me don’t have to pay the incredibly priced booking fee!

    Personally, I’m waiting for The Filter to be purchased by Apple. It’s the best freakin’ recommendation software I’ve ever used.

  17. joy

    December 20th, 2006 at 3:50 am

    While I totally understand that the iLike - Ticketmaster deal sounds good considering the space both companies are in, I have two nitpicks about it.

    1)I can’t even use the iLike client since it’s for OS X 10.4 and I’m running 10.3.9. (I know, a minor nitpick).

    2)I really can’t stand Ticketmaster and now I go out of my way to avoid them when I can. For my favorite artists, I join their fan club to get presale tickets, or when I’m stuck I try to go to stubhub, etc. Suffice it to say, that I am not sure the Ticketmaster partnering deal will especially appeal to a savvy music consumer.

  18. Rod Recker

    December 20th, 2006 at 5:00 am

    I hate Ticketmaster so much that I will never use this service knowing that they are part owners.

  19. Sean

    December 20th, 2006 at 5:17 am

    Holy crap! Is it really that easy to get an investment of that size for a brand new start-up?! Um, my start-up is cash flow positive and it’s providing a valuable service for a $60B a year industry. Plus our parent company owns five other profitable sites.

    http://www.iRegift.com

  20. The Alpha Project

    December 20th, 2006 at 6:29 am

    I get the benefit of the music discovery. But every time I see this type of opt-in marketing it makes me laugh since you just know that right around the corner will be an open source version with more access, more info, etc. There is no barrier to entry. It would have to be really useful to establish the service and create a sustainable advantage. Kazaa comes to mind. Heh.

  21. Indy artist

    December 20th, 2006 at 6:54 am

    ilike is actually GarageBand….which has been around for years. It’s where unsigned musicians can post their music and share it. It seems to me like this is their newest thing cause ilike and garageband are connected.

  22. Martin Seebach

    December 20th, 2006 at 9:16 am

    Doesn’t it suk the ugly green one that any service/feature/wotevah which one likes becomes yet another ‘in yer effing face’ ad spammer? IMHO (yeah right, H) the Web became a backoffice department on Madison Avenue somewhere between 1995 and 1997. Popup blockers built into Firefox work fairly well. My gripe is with Micro$not and their propensity for leaving the marketeers ingress through the damn bloated and amazingly buggy OS’s they release.

  23. Jordan

    December 20th, 2006 at 9:44 am

    This is great, good for iLike. Unfortunately their data is just not there yet. I have over 65,000 tracks on my computer - typed in Ben Folds and asked it to auto-generate a playlist. All it could come up with was Weezer?

    I got more recommendations from a girl I met at a bar last night.

    Unfortunately music is still passed from person to person. All this technology isn’t going to fix a thing.

  24. Joe

    December 20th, 2006 at 10:19 am

    …and they are going to make money how? $50m+ valuation? On zero revenues? Doesn’t this seem ridiculous to anyone else?

  25. Mike

    December 20th, 2006 at 11:36 am

    Jordan,

    I have a sizeable library too, not as big as yours, but big all the same. I tried iLike and encountered the same problem as you - the playlists they made for me were not impressive.

    Sound Flavor, a similiar offering, blows iLike out of the water. I can simply select a playlist or song from my library, it analyzes the other music I have, and then creates my own custom playlist.

    Sound Flavor creates playlists better than I could myself!
    http://www.soundflavor.com

    While iLike is neat, I will definitely continue using Sound Flavor because I think it is superior in every respect.

    -Mike

  26. Laura

    December 20th, 2006 at 6:24 pm

    While I liked the graphics of iLike and it seemed pretty easy to use, I agree with Mike that the music recommendations are not very good. It bugs me that ticketmaster is going to be in there soliciting on their site - just seems too commercial.

    I’ve been to several of the other sites and my pick is Goombah. They’ve given me great playlists. I’ve found several new artists that have become my favorites.

    http://www.goombah.com

  27. adam

    December 21st, 2006 at 4:04 pm

    MOG kicks ass on iLike - http://www.mog.com

  28. David Mackey

    December 23rd, 2006 at 4:40 pm

    Seems like a pretty sweet service. Though I haven’t used it yet. I think TicketMaster made a good decision pulling in 25% of this company. The cash investment probably makes it worthwhile for iLike as well.

  29. mokeefe

    December 31st, 2006 at 10:18 pm

    iLike is down right now. Looks like they wrote it in Rails:
    Application error (Rails)

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