iLike today announced that it has received $13.5 million funding from Ticketmaster.com. As part of the equity funding Ticketmaster will get 25% stake in iLike and Sean Moriarty, Ticketmaster’s president and chief operating officer, will join iLike’s board of directors. iLike had earlier received $2.5 million in funding from Khosla Ventures and MTV co-founder Bob Pitman.
iLike service enables easier discovery, sharing and browsing of music libraries of other people with similar tastes. The service music sharing recommendations works by scanning your iTunes music files and via recommendations and friends. iLike also provides free mp3 downloads of emerging artists. Besides this iLike also provides widget for users to post on their blogs which displays your recently played songs. I think the ability for users to interact and share their music tastes has been a major factor for the good uptake of the service.
Music recommendations – An evolving field:
OnTour.net, SoundFlavor, and Ricall are few of other services that study music tastes and provide enhanced services.
OnTour.net widget scans music files on users system to automatically provide tour dates for their favorite artists. OnTour currently provides widgets for Yahoo widget engine and Mac Dashboard, but does not directly support purchase of tickets.
SoundFlavor is another service whose Recommendation Engine combines precise, song-level advanced search, navigation, and personalized recommendations that helps users discover new music easily. SoundFlavor’s desktop client works on top of iTunes and analyzes songs based on various attributes, ranging from instrumentation to subject matter. SoundFlavor had received $2.3 million in Series A round lead by Amicus Capital, with Nueva Ventures and others participating.
Ricall with a similar idea but works as a music marketplace where media companies can buy and sell music. With over 3 million records, 3,500 record companies, 22,000 music publishers, Ricall targets its product towards advertising, broadcasting, multimedia, film, and companies in similar areas, who was an easier way to buy/license professional quality music. Ricall has built its music search and recommendation engine that analyzes over 140 attributes of every track in its database. Ricall’s backend platform enables accurate price estimates, complete transaction processing, and contract management for every music record a company wants to license. The Benchmark Capital Europe funded company is based out of UK.
Links:
iLike
OnTour
SoundFlavor
Ricall
February 9, 2007 at 3:54 pm |
[...] Ricall Launches site updates: Ricall, the UK based Benchmark funded music search and licensing company, has launched significant updates to its site. With over 3 million tracks to search from, Ricall now enables direct connection between music buyers (ad agencies/broadcasters/film & TV companies/…..) and music sellers (labels/artists/writers….). Ricall has also made available the advanced music search engine to all registered users. As I have written before, the search engine takes into account 140 attributes to enable search according to Mood, Activity, Demographic, Tempo, Lyric, Instrument, Chart and Sound to come back with perfect usable results. [...]
May 30, 2007 at 9:39 am |
[...] Second app for Oodle’s is “BandTracker” that allows Facebook users to track over 200,000 bands to make sure they don’t miss their favorite acts when they come to town and share information about upcoming shows with their friends. I think they would get more competition in this space as compared to the “WantList” especially with the mish-mash of iLike(which is now funded by TicketMaster) and Attendio on the Facebook platform. [...]