Facebook helps iLike stand out in Internet crowd

By Antony Bruno

DENVER (Billboard) - A month ago, iLike was just another online music community struggling for relevancy in an increasingly crowded market.

Today, it's the fastest-growing digital music service on the Internet, registering 1 million new users per week and fielding information requests from record labels every half-hour.

The difference is Facebook.

Facebook was once a niche social networking site limited to college students. Then two things happened. First, in September, Facebook opened the service to anyone. Membership doubled to 25 million, about 60 percent of whom are not college students. Then, in May, it opened its technology platform to outside developers, letting them build their own custom applications using all the tools and features of the Facebook service.

iLike was one such company taking advantage of this opportunity. The music-sharing site enables users to share music preferences, receive personalized concert and music recommendations and includes a "sidebar" for Apple's iTunes that creates automatic playlists based on one's iTunes library.

THE OLD WAY

Before teaming with Facebook, iLike required users to visit the iLike site, set up a profile and then try to match friends in their e-mail contact list to existing iLike members. New users had to sort through a massive database of artists to tell the iLike service which artists and music they prefer. Then they needed to e-mail their friends and convince them to join as well in order to share music recommendations.

iLike first went live in October; through May it attracted about 3 million users. Then the company made a version of the service for Facebook. Within three weeks, that incarnation signed up 3.7 million users, and continues to add about 1 million per week, far overshadowing the original Web site.