iLike Growing Quickly, Still Massively Trailing Last.fm

Last.fm is easier to use straight away - no signup required.

I prefer Pandora for discovering new music. Their “genome” project is very impressing.

as far as i can see this supports only itunes…
last.fm supports various players…looks better is more about music then about being myspace…
i am sticking to last.fm thank you very much

hi mike. was good to meet up in London. 2 things: Last.fm is collecting 500 million data pieces (or scrobbles, as we call them) per month. since we started collecting in 2003 we gathered over 6 billion data items, arguably the largest set of music usage data currently available. martin, CCO at Last.fm

Of course Pandora and Lastfm are awesome sites and I have enjoyed listening to them.
Other companies such as http://www.musintelligence.com have been employing mathematicians and musicians for many years to devise algorithms to categorize music. The results sem to vary from “Great! Exactly what I like” to “Skip that crap”.

We like the approach of discovering new music through friends, that you know and trust, like what MOG and iLike are facilitating and have set up our German site http://www.musicswop.de accordingly.
It’s still in the beginning and new features will be added soon.

Mike, another U.S. startup in this space is Qloud, based in the Washington DC area: http://www.qloud.com/ A coupla young turks out of AOL with some of Steve’s money… They seem to be making progress, esp with their Mac version, since I blogged about ‘em last fall.

Graeme

I find MOG to be the better player, because the focus is on what listeners think about their music. Meaning, the blogging is central to the service, whereas Last.fm is all about the stats which isn’t all that interesting to me.

I like growing quickly too!! Who doesn’t??!

I like is a nice interface. It should do well. Has anyone seen any of the implementations from tickemaster. I bought a ticket the other day for the blue man group and the were email tickets that had ilike posted on it for site advertisement. Although ilike is newer i still use last.fm + they’ve opened up their api which should help it keep its stronghold. I saw an ilike for sports the other day at isportif.com and i would like to see if this app will be more like last.fm

Martin — iLike actually announced limited support today for Windows Media Player which will turn into a larger roll out soon.

Oobie Doobie - -iLike helps its users by being able to connect them with people who like similar music or want to be introduced to new music. iLike does NOT require signing up for either the site or to download the sidebar but without sign up you don’t get all the benefits. I know Ali Partovi, the CEO, had hoped to weigh in here and he will as soon as he is in front of his computer. Thanks guys!

The reported numbers don’t seem to add up. In four months, they’ve reached 500K? Looking at the alexa graphs in comparison to digg:

http://www.alexaholic.com/ilike.com+digg.com

Digg reached the 500K mark in late August of last year. If you trust alexa numbers at all in this case, it doesn’t seem possible that ilike, that is an order of magnitude less trafficked than digg, can be considered on even par.

http://blog.digg.com/?p=40

I may be wrong, but lately I’m having a tough time believing any stats that startups are throwing out.

You are forgetting a big one, Scope. Collecting millions music, movie, software chunks of geographical ntelligence a month but they have a killer webtool but only sell it to studios, ad agencies, labels, etc. Might be interesting if one of the consumer tools also referenced data from that source.

http://www.divinityassets.com

I see Pandora like the old Y! directory; individuals manually categorizing a body of material. At the end of the day, it just doesn’t scale. Y! found that out the hard way.

This is a really crowded space and given the reluctance of consumers to pay for music it’s going to take some creativity in business models (and a liberal privacy policy) to make money.

Brooke good catch on the windows media player.

Parker i checked out http://www.isportif.com and I see what you mean it does a lot of aggregation of sports news and youtube feeds for teams across the leagues Great catch on this will pass this on in my blog.

Most defintley interesting that - its growing so fast. With (3) companies growing so fast, it validates the size of the market. Maybe room for another?

- Rbowles

I have never tried either of these services. Will have to give them a look.

J

It’s not often you come across a website giving away free money http://www.erstelin.com I’m not sure if these guys are real or not, but I’m in.

Hey All. David Hyman from MOG here. This seemed like a good place to share some thoughts and tease you with some upcoming news. First of all, music isn’t just about the notes, the bpm, or even the songs. The music you listen to is a form of self expression. Content, community AND music recommendations are critical to provide the ultimate experience to music lovers. MOG’s early adopters know that all too well and have created one of the most impressive music-focused editorial destinations/raging music scenes on the web. We’re very proud of that. But now we have to make that content (editorial, MP3’s, video) more accessible. That’s all I’ll say now, but know we’ve got some major improvements lined up for all y’all. We hope you’ll be stopping by MOG in the coming weeks to see some significant new features.

I’m addicted to the iLike site!

Not only is the interface clean and easy to use, but the breadth of free open mp3 downloads of amazing indie artists has my music collection beefed up by close to 5,000 new tracks…

As a fan I appreciate the ‘hip factor’ of discovering new music that nobody else is listening to… At least yet

I think it’s critical for true music fans to support the indie artists out there and iLike is the best solution for finding and acquiring these artists music.

I really question last.fm strenght in math. They claim to have >40m tracks. Do your own math using this simple example: http://www.last.fm/explore/sea.....=0&y=0. I also wonder how useful are all the data they have been collecting when they don’t really now if a “scrobble” is an actual play or a skip. I wonder what would happen if Viacom was technology-savvy enough to do the right math.

Pandora is STILL the best for discovering new music.Cleanest,simplest interface without all the foolish blogging/social networking crap,and no relation to “itunes”,thank God.The Music Genome project is nothing short of brilliant.I’ll be sticking with Pandora,period.

@ drmusic - The information that last.fm gives you isn’t of an all around importance to anyone other than the user them self. If you go three months with the scrobbler turned on and never once visit the site, maintaining your usual music listening habits, i guarantee that you will find something new about the music you like when you go look at your charts. And for the record, a scrobble takes place (at least, how i’ve seen it) at around 1/2 way through the song. So if my song is 12 minutes long it will mark that i listened to the song at the 6 minute mark.

I enjoy last.fm immensely. I could almost go as far as to say that i’m addicted to it. If i listen to music in my car or am at a friends house i always feel retarded because my last.fm can’t scrobble that stuff. At first i thought both MOG and iLike were copy-cats, but it seems to me that iLike is almost an exact rip-off of last.fm with poorly executed features and an equally poorly executed look and feel. MOG comes off as more of a brainchild of someone who looked at last.fm and wanted to improve on some missing features, while ignoring the ones that make last.fm so contagious.

Final Words - pay attention to MOG and forget iLike, love last.fm

I might have to give Last.fm a try…have yet to do so

Yes, but does last.fm hand out their member’s e-mail addresses to everyone on the Internet list iLike does? No, really, go check it out on the Help:Contact Us page. Hit reload a few times and watch everyone’s e-mail address and name show up. Then reconsider whether you want to give them your address…

Last fm is really an enjoyable experience although it seems off sometimes on the connections- like the vocal minority connecting indie to anything. I’ll have to give iLike a go. I am really liking the music I have found, free and otherwise on Goombah - but it takes a bit to get used to the UI. The math seems very good and the tracks are not always predictable. The recommendations come from nearest neighbors and they claim to have 6 million tracks.

I tried last.fm but hated the fact that it could not look backwards over the thousands of song plays I have had in the past. Ideally I wanted something hat would look at history and my ratings for each song - it’s taken me five years to get to this point - I don’t want to chuck it away.

So then I tried ilike. this DOES look at my history. thank goodness. sadly not my starred ratings, but certainly the history. that’s why I think it’s way better than last.fm.

Oh, and as sopmone else said, they have great links for every song you play to free MP3s from unsigned artists.

I use The Filter which so far is the only product that seems to actually work with what I own to give me playlists rather than what everyone else is listening to. I don’t think I really like being told that certain acts sound like other acts I like and The Filter is more about working with your library but you can get new music if you want.

Highly recommend it for those of you who like me take your ipod everywhere.

Shock Ed, I’m not seeing the same problem you’re seeing in terms of email address privacy. I’ve been using iLike for a while and never seen that. If it was a problem, maybe it was brief or they fixed it.

My favorite thing about iLike compared to last.FM is that iLike works much better with itunes, and it’s simply faster (thanks to AJAX) and has better uptime. this past summer lastfm’s scrobbling was down for a month. yux

Since most of these sites (practically anything thats web 2.0) seem geared towards people under 25, I’ll stick with Pandora for a while longer……

Kind of a shame, too…. there’s lots of us old dinosaurs on the net that have been here for years and still enjoy the experience…..

I wish ‘em luck though!

I find it funny that iTunes supports Windows 2000 (which I use), but iLike only supports Windows XP.

Seems like some healthy competition occurring between Last.fm and Mog, with iLike nipping at their heels. Honestly though, the number of recommendation services seems to be proliferating crazily - I’m trying to keep up with them with this overview at my site. My problem with iLike - at least on the Mac - is its drawer interface. I just don’t like having it squash up my iTunes window. Anyway, thanks for the continuing reports on this area.

I think Last.fm uses a better layout and fill the pages with more useful data, in order they are the only one that makes stats data available for free via a web service and finally also the player (so the submits) is released with a free license, leaving to users more freedom about the use of their products

this is for me absolutley the best way to do what they are promising with “social music revolution”

I love last.fm, it has help me to discover a lot of new artists, I tried MOG once but I think it’s very social oriented to be interesting for me , but I do find it interesting as a last.fm/myspace hybrid many people may enjoy it. About Ilike I really don’t see anything new about it, It’s uglier, less useful and less social than last.fm. Now here comes the spam , I hope you don’t delete it because it’s a useful spam –>

As an Gift for the last.fm community I made a software that allow you enhance your stats experience in last.fm, try it here –> http://www.last.fm/user/C26000.....30/195693/ , something that I’m sure that is not avaliable in the others sites…

one more point for last.fm

I love this forum because people so often ask the questions that I would. With this post, however, I actually agree that I’m not as worried about the revenue. So many companies these days play what I call the “YouTube Lottery.” Everyone knows about the crazy money YouTube got, but not much is written (even on TechCrunch) about the 100s of companies that made it nowhere, They didn’t win the lottery the way that YouTube did.http://www.buydownload.net