Digital Music Frontier

iLike is a new social networking music site similar to Last.fm. I’m sure I’m not the first to say that I like iLike… Moving on… There are a number of reasons why iLike is successful as a social networking music site.

iLike has a very simple and good looking interface. On the profile page your picture shows up top left with some details about you, like Myspace. Then below, you have songs you have recently tagged iLike, recently played songs, songs recently added to your library, most played songs, artists that you ‘like’ (these show up like friends, like Myspace friends, and some will populate automatically when you sync with iTunes), and finally a list of people on iLike with similar tastes. Then on the right side of the page there is a thumbnail-style list of your friends on iLike.

Everything is very easy to read and easy to access and it isn’t cluttered with advertising. The iLike interface is better than any social networking music site to date.

The iLike sidebar for iTunes is great. The iLike sidebar for iTunes is a sidebar that attaches itself to the right side of iTunes when you open it. Then, when you play music through iTunes, it recommends similar artists (it puts major and indie label artists at the top of the sidebar and unsigned Garageband artists at the bottom - the Garageband artists have to compete for this real estate by having their songs reviewed on Garageband.com, iLike’s sister site). Sometimes when you play a relative unknown like Mount Eerie (aka Microphones), you get some interesting recommendations, not at all similar, but iLike claims this will get better as the site continues to grow and similar artists get linked to each other through the iLike users. The recommendations it gives can be previewed immediately and these previews last around 20 seconds.

What the sidebar is missing however, is that unlike the Last.fm scrobbler, the iLike sidebar does not have biography for the artist you are listening to. When you play an artist with the Last.fm scrobbler open, it will bring up a bio of that artist. I always liked this feature, but at the same time for most people this probably isn’t a huge issue, since most people already know the biography of the artists they have on their computer.

The ‘iLike Challenge’ game is fun if you’re into wasting time. When you go to your homepage on iLike it gives you an option to play the iLike Challenge, which is a music quiz game. You listen to songs and name the artist or the song and it gives you points and a rank that is displayed on your homepage. For instance, I have accumulated 3,025 points and have a rank of “Music Expert.” On the quiz page it will also show where you stand against your iLike friends. It is fun to use mainly because it’s quick and easy and fun to see your rank and and thumbnail move up alongside your friends.

Unfortunately, the music it plays as part of the quiz leaves a lot to be desired. It plays mainly hit songs from the last 5 years. If I have to answer “Yellowcard” or “Black Eyed Peas” one more time, I’ll gladly give up my rank of “Music Expert.”

The Garageband functionality is nice. I’m a huge fan of independent music, and since I’m an independent musician myself, I like to support other indie musicians. But as most people who like independent music know, it can be very difficult and time consuming to sift through hour after hour of independent music. There is a ton of independent music out there - some of it good and a lot of it not so good. Thankfully, Garageband acts, in this case, as a filter. As I mentioned earlier, to be recommended on iLike, independent artists have to go through the competition process on Garageband first.

So far, I have heard some very good independent music recommended to me on iLike that otherwise I would not have had the time or energy to find on my own.

Another nice feature here is that Garageband artists usually have one or two tracks available as free Mp3’s that can be easily downloaded right from the sidebar.

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Coming in Web 2.0 Review: iLike Part II… More of the good, as well as one major drawback.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 5:55 pm and is filed under Web 2.0, iLike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.