Thanks to Facebook, social music service iLike Inc. has become one of the best-known brands in the digital music sphere. Half of iLike's total user base gains access to the service via the Facebook Inc. social networking platform, according to company president Hadi Partovi in an interview appearing in the upcoming issue of Billboard.
Among daily active users, Partovi says 30 to 40% come from Facebook, while only 25% come from its own iLike.com site. (I spoke with Partovi's twin brother Ali, the company's CEO, last week, when iLike revealed new features and said its total user base had reached 30 million people. Each Partovi brother is known for previous entrepreneurial efforts: Ali founded LinkExchange, sold to Microsoft Corp. for $265 million in 1998, while Hadi was the co-creator of TellMe Networks, which Microsoft bought for about $800 million.)
While iLike has successfully piggybacked on Facebook's open platform, the company is now looking to expand to other areas by opening its own application programming interface, which allows third-party developers to add music to their sites via iLike.
"Most companies would be embarrassed that one-fifth of their registered user base comes from their own Web site," Hadi told Billboard. "We really don't care. For us, it's more important to put our stuff where the users are."
He goes on to suggest that iLike wants to become far more pervasive within other Web sites, by opening up code instead of striking partnerships one by one. "The next level of integration is to go to... the next hundred or thousand smaller sites." Hadi gives the example of adding songs to online greeting cards; Ali told me last week he envisioned adding songs to games that bear a vague resemblance to online Scrabble.
"[W]e'll monetize the way we monetize everything else," adds Hadi in the Billboard interview. It's not clear whether iLike is making much money yet, or whether it's nearing profitability. Its services are generally free to consumers, and although it has added a new revenue stream via its concert advertising system, Ali conceded to me that it may raise additional capital soon. iLike last raised private capital in 2006, and has taken in at least $15.8 million in two rounds from investors including Ticketmaster, Bob Pittman and Vinod Khosla.
Other brands in the digital music sphere, such as Imeem Inc. and Last.fm Ltd., have also opened APIs that have enabled them to syndicate content elsewhere. As with most Web 2.0 services, it may be more important for iLike to establish a well-known brand, then worry about profitability later. Content syndication through an open API may be the fastest and most efficient way for a company such as iLike to do that. -- Paul Bonanos
See July 21 post on Tech Confidential concerning iLike's new services and user milestone
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