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