Keith Urban collaboration; iLike drives 3x growth in music buying

Late last week we announced an exciting, ongoing collaboration with Keith Urban, the GRAMMY® award-winning musician, songwriter and performer. Throughout the duration of his popular tour, Keith will create weekly video posts exclusively for iLike and his online fan community using our iCast™ multi-media blogging tools. The videos will feel like an all access backstage pass, documenting what it’s really like to be on the road and behind-the-scenes with superstar Keith Urban.

To celebrate the announcement, a select group of iLike users were invited to attend Keith’s concert in Chicago on November 16. These lucky fans attended a private performance in Keith’s backstage lounge, went to sound check, posed for a group photo with Keith, and were given amazing seats in the AllState Arena. For those of us who were in attendance, it was a special night that we will never forget. The best part is, Keith let the fans film their experiences and the footage will soon be available, along with Keith’s first iCast video post, on Keith Urban's iLike Artist Page.

This is the just the latest example of a major artist leveraging the power of iLike to communicate directly with fans across the Web. Keith and all artists can now take a video using a cameraphone and post it instantly to their Artist Page for immediate syndication on iLike.com, Facebook and beyond; We refer to it as “Post Once, Publish Everywhere” using the iLike Universal Artist Dashboard.

In other news, we recently received exciting preliminary results from a research collaboration indicating that using the iLike Sidebar for iTunes and Windows Media Player results in a 250% increase in a user’s music-purchasing within a month of using the iLike service.

These results are a powerful validation of our business model; Our vision is to give every artist a channel to communicate directly with anybody who likes their music while fostering music discovery and acquisition. It’s no surprise, given this new data, that iLike is one of the leading iTunes and Ticketmaster affiliates. Update: The research study results are now available on the iLike press release blog.