Digital Music Frontier

Recently, iLike announced that it has topped 1 million users, which still puts it way behind Last.fm. But for being only a little over 6 months old that’s a pretty good number. Here are a few more reasons (for Part I of the review, click here) to check it out, as well as one small quibble.

The concerts feature is very handy. I don’t know about you, but sometimes it can be a very daunting (not to mention time consuming) task to keep up with your favorite bands and when they are on tour and playing near you. iLike makes this very easy. When you register at iLike, and you give them your zip code, whenever a band or artist is playing near you, an “on tour” icon will show up next to their picture. The link will take you to the artist’s iLike concert page where it will show when and where they are playing near you. For each show, there is a link that will take you to Ticketmaster. Right now, I believe this is only available for shows through Ticketmaster, but this is still a very nice feature to have.

Podcasts don’t show up on any lists. As small as this may seem, I listen to a lot of podcasts and as much as I like the Tony Kornheiser Show, it isn’t music and it shouldn’t show up on any lists, but it does on Last.fm and Virb. Thankfully, the designers at iLike figured out a way to keep podcasts and other non-music items from showing upon any recently or most played lists.

“Show me the songs I don’t own.” If you go to an artist page and click on “Top Songs,” it will bring up a list of the artists most played songs according to iLike users. Then at the top of the list there is a link titled “show me the songs I don’t own.” If you click this link, iLike will bring up a list of the songs by that artist that you don’t already have on your computer. This is a very useful tool for completing collections, finding holes in collections, etc.

The widget looks cool. I really like Last.fm, but the widgets they provide, leave a lot to be desired. The iLike widget, which shows your recently played songs, most played songs/artists, etc. that can be displayed on a website, Myspace page, or blog, looks good. As far as I can tell, it isn’t customizable yet. But for a starting point, it’s nice.

. . .

Now the one major drawback…

No comprehensive radio feature like Last.fm or Pandora. Obviously, now is a tough time to be in the internet radio business, but for any social music discovery site, it seems you should have a radio feature, where it looks at the user data and creates user-specific playlists.

There are plenty of ways to find new music on iLike, whether it is through the related artists, friend recommendations, sidebar recommendations, etc., but for iLike to be the social music discovery site, it needs to have a radio function. It’s as simple as that, and until it does, places like Last.fm, Pandora, and others, will still be the places to go to discover new music. Because with a radio, you can just put it on and let it go to work for you, unlike iLike, where you have to work, going from link to link, to discover new music. Is it easy to use? Yes. But does it require time and work? Yes.

. . .

On the whole though, iLike is beautifully put together. Everything is arranged in a logical way. The site is exceptionally clean and easy to look at and it has a number of features that other social music discovery sites can’t quite match. There is certainly some room left for improvement, but if you are a music fan (and I assume that you are, if you are reading this), iLike is definitely worth checking out.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 7:50 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.