iLike Unveils Sidebar for iTunes and Web Site Enabling Music Discovery via Personalized Recommendations and Friends
iLike.com has launched the first social music discovery service designed for iTunes and iPod users. iLike helps people discover new music and share their listening experience with friends. The iLike Sidebar for iTunes complements Apple’s popular media player with a “buddy list” and features for music sharing and discovery. The iLike website (www.iLike.com) gives users a profile of their music listening habits and helps them explore the music libraries of friends. iLike also provides personalized recommendations of free MP3 downloads from almost 200,000 independent artists, drawn from GarageBand.com, the company’s first website.
The Seattle-based company features a legendary line-up of technology and music industry leaders, former Beatles’ producer George Martin, and Jerry Harrison of The Talking Heads, among them.
iLike’s key features are:
* Linking with friends. iLike’s first aim is to facilitate word-of-mouth music discovery. For example, with iLike, a consumer can easily see, “What music are my friends listening to that I don’t have yet?”
* Personalized Free MP3s. Intelligent recommendation of free downloads from hundreds of thousands of independent artists is achieved via integration with GarageBand.com’s award-winning collaborative-filtering engine.
* Designed for iTunes / iPod. The iLike Sidebar for iTunes offers a buddy list for discovering music through friends, inline music recommendations, and a one-click playlist generator.
“With iLike, the iTunes and iPod experience finally expands from being a solitary activity to a social one, enabling consumers to discover a world of new music and to share that experience with their friends,” said Hadi Partovi, COO of iLike.com. “In addition, the integration of iLike with GarageBand.com brings tremendous benefits to independent musicians, as it helps new artists get discovered directly based on the merits of their music.”
The iLike Sidebar is currently available for iTunes on both Mac and Windows. The company anticipates supporting other media players in the future.
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