(Billboard/Reuters) "Social networks prepare own music services"

By Antony Bruno
April 19, 2008

[Excerpt]

DENVER (Billboard) - One of the biggest new-media sensations to emerge from last year were music-related widgets -- mini-applications that allowed members of social networking services like MySpace or Facebook to customize their profiles with such music features as streamed playlists and tour calendars with links to ticket sales.    

TICKETS
Any concert ticketing service will almost certainly have to include Ticketmaster, but the wild card is iLike -- in which the industry giant owns a stake. The No. 1 music application on Facebook has very little exposure on MySpace, and as such has little to fear from an overlapping service

But iLike has grown far beyond its tour-date roots. The company is making a point of getting directly into MySpace's knickers by hosting artist profiles where participating acts can stream music, post videos and more. R.E.M. made headlines by streaming its new album "Accelerate" on iLike rather than MySpace, generating 1.5 million streams in the six days prior to its release.

What's more, iLike syndicates artist pages across a host of participating social networks -- including Facebook, Bebo and Hi5--and its recommendation engine makes it easier for artists to add friends to their profiles. (U2 has 10 times more friends on iLike than MySpace.)

"We always used MySpace as our inspiration and tried to innovate beyond it," iLike CEO Ali Partovi says. "They now seem to be duplicating things that we've created."

Reuters/Billboard