As Music 2.0 Action Shifts To Facebook, iLike & Others Turn Up Volume

PAL ALTO, CA (Hypebot) – MySpace has been the hub of Music 2.0

promotion for more than a year, but recently Facebook has been

stealing the social networking spotlight and the new music

industry is following.

Colors At Digital Music West pundit Bob Lefsetz declared,

"MySpace isn't about music its about getting laid," and

marketers seem to agree shifting more efforts towards the

slightly more serious Facebook. The action began when Facebook

opened its network to outside developers, but bor the site

appears to be making music moves of its own.

According to PaidContent
, Facebook will be launching a new band promotional platform to compete with MySpace later this year. Other sources have Facebook exploring their own iTunes competitor to replace their current affiliation with the download giant.

iLike Adds Faceook Artist Services Platform

Action linking to Facebook from outside music destinations also

abounds. Last week AmieStreet known for demand based download

pricing launched a "create your own virtual record label"

contest on Facebook. Now artist/fan community iLike jumped on

the bandwagon integrating many of its features and a new Artist

Services Platform within Facebook.

Leveraging iLike’s “Artist-Fan Graph” database of connections

between fans and their favorite artists, the new Artist

Services Platform is intended to transform the way artists

cultivate and communicate with their fanbases.

iLike boasts 13 million users worldwide and claims three

million more are being added monthly. Among the growing number

of music applications built on Facebook, iLike has a dominant

first-place position, with 20 times more daily users than the

second-place contender, according to Facebook’s public

applications directory. The new features announced today

include iCast, a multimedia blogging tool including mobile

video posting for artists, and a personalized news feed for

fans.

According to Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike. “Over the

past few months we’ve accumulated a tremendous wealth of

information about who likes what and now we’re empowering

artists to use this data to cultivate their own viral fan

communities.”

Features of the iLike Artist Services Platform

iLike’s new Artist Services Platform is free and available to

all artists. To participate, artists sign up at

www.iLike.com/forartists. New features include the following:

One Dashboard to Manage Artist Pages on Multiple Sites:

Artists and their representatives can now reach fans among both

iLike.com and Facebook users through a single dashboard.

Designed for use by music industry professionals, the iLike

Artist Dashboard allows a manager to manage multiple artists

via a single login, and allows multiple account holders (such

as record label representatives, managers and so forth) to

share access to a single artist.

Multimedia Blogging with iCast: Designed to encourage

artist-fan communication, iLike’s new iCast tool allows artists

to post messages with text, photos, audio and video.

Convenient Mobile Videocasting: iCast enables artists to

post content directly from any mobile phone via email. Turning

any cameraphone into an instant personal broadcasting system,

artists can now communicate with fans from wherever they want

to – capturing candid moments on video from the back of a tour

bus, inside the recording studio, backstage at a sold-out show

and so forth.

Personalized Artist Activity Feed & Concert Alerts for

Fans: Powerfully leveraging iLike’s “Artist-Fan Graph” of

people’s music tastes, the artist activity feed will inform

fans when their favorite artists post iCast messages, upload

songs or videos or announce new events. Fans on Facebook will

also be alerted via stories inserted into their News Feed.

Stats and Reports for Artists: The number of fans an

artist has access to will now be made public on every artist

page. Additionally, iLike will provide artists with more

detailed stats about how their fanbase is interacting with

their content. For example, iLike will report on the number of

an artist’s songs that have been added to user profiles.

Find more information on the iLike Artist Services Platform here.