iLike, a social music service that has created one of the more popular applications for Facebook's platform, has changed the app's name to the more straightforward "Music."
"Over 40 million music fans like you have used iLike to share music and discover concerts, and we're grateful to you for being one of them," an e-mail sent to members who have installed the app said. "To maintain consistency with other Facebook applications, we're renaming the 'iLike' application to simply 'Music.'"
The company name hasn't changed, and it hasn't yet reflected this on its Web site. But head over to Facebook, and the app's name has changed to "Music (iLike)."
"It's just a name change," iLike representative Emily Glassman told CNET News in an e-mail. "We did some research and saw that every other big app is named as a common noun ('Causes,' 'Movies,' 'Bumper Sticker,' etc.) and we wanted to be more consistent with what seems to be the norm on the Facebook Platform."
I'm going to put on my Web 2.0 tinfoil hat for a second and wonder if changing its app name to simply "Music" is something that iLike has wanted to do for a while, but couldn't because of internal regulations at Facebook. There were, at a time, loads of rumors that Facebook would be launching a music service of its own. One would think they'd want the name "Music" to be reserved for it.
It's a stretch, but iLike taking the "Music" app name could be taken as a sign that Facebook won't be creating its own service with that name. Either that, or maybe they'll buy this one. And that's too many conspiracy theories for a Saturday afternoon.
This post was updated at 5:16 p.m. PT.
Buzzworthy social music service Project Playlist has signed another major-label deal: EMI Music has licensed its catalog to the company, which hired former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta as its CEO in November and says that over 52 million playlists have been created to date by its over 42 million registered users.
The first major-label deal for Project Playlist was with Sony BMG, an agreement announced in December. The company had previously been sued by a number of big players in the music industry, including EMI, because of the amount of unauthorized content uploaded to its servers. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) also threw its hat in the lawsuit ring, and social networks MySpace and Facebook banned Project Playlist's embeddable widgets.
Music industry sources say that the RIAA's suit on behalf of the major labels was not dropped and that the industry group is still overseeing the case even though Sony BMG and EMI are not part of it.
"It is crucial for us to continue connecting our users with more of their favorite music," Van Natta said in a release. "This partnership will provide us with a wide-ranging selection of content to satisfy our users' appetites to share and purchase music. We are excited to now have both EMI and Sony BMG music catalogs available and we hope to continue to expand and enhance our service."
There are plenty of competitors for Project Playlist in the social music space: other big players are MySpace's own MySpace Music, which reportedly had sought Van Natta to spearhead the project; Last.fm (owned by CNET News publisher CBS Interactive); and Imeem, which was rumored to be in talks with Project Playlist for a possible merger. We haven't heard much about that recently.
This post was updated at 10:28 a.m. PT with information about the RIAA's suit against Project Playlist.
There's finally an end to the speculation over what former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta would do next: he's taken the job as CEO of a site called Project Playlist, according to Kara Swisher of AllThingsD.
He had already been an investor in the music discovery company, and there have been blog-circulated rumor about his new gig for several weeks now.
The move comes shortly after Van Natta withdrew his offer to take the CEO position at MySpace's new music venture. All signs now point to MTV exec Courtney Holt to take that job, but no formal announcement has been made.
AllThingsD confirms what many had figured: Van Natta, in his quest for a CEO position, wasn't interested in taking a job at a venture run by the News Corp.-owned MySpace. It's not quite a start-up, no matter how trendy its office space might be.
Start-up Project Playlist has snagged a hefty round of financing led by former AOL exec Bob Pittman's invested firm, Pilot Group--probably somewhere between $18 million and $20 million, Swisher wrote.
The New York-based Pilot Group stays low-key, but it already has a stake in a growing social-media site, Buzznet, which focuses on music and other pop-culture content and has an additional investment from Universal Music Group. Pilot Group was the majority owner of DailyCandy when the women's events newsletter site sold to Comcast for about $125 million earlier this year.
As for Project Playlist, it's a lot like Imeem or the ill-fated Muxtape: members can build playlists and embed them across the Web. The site was sued by the RIAA back in April. Like Muxtape, it's fairly stripped-down, but a ticker at the top of the page says that over 38 million playlists have been created.
Van Natta stepped down from his role at Facebook amid, naturally, plenty of rumors. He left the company in February as chief revenue officer, after having previously been chief operating officer, which some bloggers speculated was a demotion. When he left, he made it clear that he wanted a CEO post somewhere--which set off even more speculation that Van Natta had wanted Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's job, and left when it looked like there was no chance the young founder would step aside. That's unconfirmed, of course.
The issue with a company like Project Playlist? Aside from its RIAA woes, which are pretty much protocol in the music business, the "music discovery" niche is clogged beyond belief. There's Imeem, Pandora, iLike and its popular Facebook app, and Last.fm (owned by CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News). Even Apple's iTunes now has its "Genius" discovery sidebar, and MySpace Music is a high-profile new entry in the field. Even Van Natta's old company, Facebook, is rumored to be interested in doing more when it comes to music.
"Discovery around music is exploding on the Internet," Van Natta told AllThingsD when he spoke to Swisher about his new gig. "And the company that does the best job of taking advantage of that is really going to be huge."
Well, let's hope he picked the right one.
Hey, indie bands. Does MySpace Music's big focus on the major labels make you sad? iLike wants to hear from you--literally.
The "social music" company, best-known for its add-on apps for Facebook and iTunes, has partnered with music distribution start-up TuneCore so that unsigned artists can market their music through iLike and get royalties when it's streamed there.
TuneCore already lets independent artists sell their music through iTunes, Amazon MP3, and Rhapsody, which has a deal with iLike (and MTV and Yahoo).
It's not surprising that a company such as iLike would choose to make a move in favor of indie artists. The most high-profile digital-music initiative to emerge this year was MySpace Music, a streaming and retail marketplace created by the News Corp.-owned social network. But while MySpace got its start as a promotional center for indie bands, MySpace Music has focused on the four major labels, all of which have invested in the project. While independent distributor The Orchard also has contributed to MySpace Music, some indie musicians have said they feel jilted.
iLike CEO Ali Partovi says partnering with TuneCore isn't, in fact, a MySpace Music-induced move.
"Not at all. We've been in dialogue, I think, since February," Partovi said of TuneCore. "We've been fans of each others' companies for a long time, trying to work out a way to work with each other, and this was well under way before all of that (MySpace Music) surfaced. We generally have tried to focus on what we're doing ourselves, not to do things in response."
He added, "Frankly, I think the talk about MySpace's issue--I think over time, they will work that out too." MySpace Music is indeed still new and has plenty of time to renew its focus on the indies. But for now, iLike has quite the opportunity.
CBS' $280 million darling Last.fm has unveiled a small, somewhat unexciting portion of its services this morning called "Playground." The space will be a new test bed for works-in-progress features that aren't quite ready for prime time and need a little user testing to work out the kinks. While lacking in eye candy, some of the tools are actually quite useful for music discovery.
Starting today there are three to play with: multi-tag search, artist name variations, and a listing of the tracks that make it the most to the weekly top 10. Of the bunch, my favorite is the multi-tag search, which lets you combine several tags together to build and execute highly customized searches either with tags you type in, or those selected from a large cloud. In comparison, the site's current utilities only let you browse by single tag or search by band name.
Speaking of band names, the new search tool that splits up the results by band name spelling is really neat. Band names are one of the key reasons for disambiguation in people's digital music collections, and the artist name variation tool lists some of the alternate names that make their way onto the service via ID3 tags. Anyone with a large music library with content from multiple sources will run into this unless they've used some sort of ID3 tag clean-up utility. (Here's a good one.) A fun one to try is guitar legend Jimi Hendrix. I've purchased a ton of his albums over the years, and when ripping them to my library I've managed to get several spellings of his name. A simple search in the band name tool pulls up 20 different spellings and variations of tracks he's on, including percentages of how much that particular name appears in his online music presence. Neat.
And I thought people had trouble with my last name. In Hendrix's case, it was his first and last that gave people trouble, which we can see with Last.fm's experimental artist name search tool. (Click to do the search yourself.)
(Credit: CNET Networks)
While the battle to access your music and video files on the go continues both of the software front with services like Qloud, Orb and Simplify Media, there's also the hardware side of things with placeshifting technology from Sling Media, SanDisk and others. Ultimately people want a really simple way to enjoy their stuff elsewhere with a soft or Webware experience that's easy to use.
rVibe is an interesting piece of Windows software that opened up its doors to the public last month. It's half jukebox, half social music marketplace that's taken a new approach to music pricing and sharing by giving users a sizable array of songs that can be both streamed and downloaded using two different price points. While the music comes from a combination of sources, the actual transfer of the songs is handled via p2p in a similar fashion to Napster in the days or yore.
Listen to tracks on your hard drive and get recommendations on tracks for sale from your friends with rVibe.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Streaming a song will cost you $.03 a pop, while downloading an entire copy (sans-DRM and at a audiophile-friendly 320 kbps) runs $.99. RVibe has a built-in recommendation service that lets you suggest a track you've purchased to one of your friends. If they end up buying it, you get $.05 back, which can either be spent on more music or donated to charity. It's also worth noting that every time you pay for a streamed song, it will reduce the price of purchasing the track by subtracting the price of a streaming session, all the way down to $.78 a track (or seven streamed plays). While there's a preview portion of the service called "auditions" I wouldn't mind seeing a super low cost streaming option in other popular online music stores to avoid purchasing songs with deceptively good preview clips.
Today they're launching "rVibe Anywhere" which is their personal streaming component. Assuming you've got a copy of rVibe running on the machine with your music library, you can get full access to all your tracks, along with the capability to share any purchased songs with others with an embeddable player widget. While the incredibly popular iTunes software from Apple can accomplish similar feats locally (and across the Web by fooling it with plug-ins), rVibe's solution is a little more extensible from the get go when it comes to making music sharing a social experience. Despite Apple launching their own set of Widgets earlier this year, clicking on a song still requires firing up iTunes, which everyone might not have.
... Read More
Social.fm (formerly Mercora) has a new music sharing widget for social networking users that's got a few tricks up its sleeve. For one thing, it'll scour your profile (on the Facebook version) to figure out your musical tastes, and then do its best to serve up a playlist of those same artists, or others that have been clumped in the same playlists by Social.FM's DJs. The great hope is that the player will adapt to your changing tastes.
Like Qloud's solution, which I took a look at earlier this month, the widget goes hand-in-hand with a desktop application that will link up to your library and do the same thing with your entire music collection. The weakness therein is the widget's UI, which borrows from Apple's CoverFlow sans actual player controls save a large stop button. While this works okay for a few songs, like the inherent weakness of CoverFlow as a navigation medium, the system falls apart if you're actually trying to browse a large music collection or use the right side of your brain for finding artists, albums, or genres.
Look familiar? Yeah Social.fm's social networking jukebox widget looks a lot like Apple's CoverFlow.
(Credit: CNET Networks)One thing Social.FM does really well (as it should) is serve up good music. There are some high-quality tracks on here, and a lot of it is surprisingly not just run-of-the-mill studio cuts, but radio appearances or professionally recorded live performances. One of my big beefs with Qloud was that the entirety of the content was coming from YouTube, and there was no way to really dig in to try to get better versions of a song. Facebook users get the added benefit of being able to share their listening habits with others, as listening to a track will publish to your mini feed, and music your friends are listening to will show up in the main news feed if they've got the app installed.
Social.FM is serving up two versions of the widget, one that's a Facebook app, and another that you can plug into any social networking service or site that can handle Adobe Flash embeds, like MySpace, Friendster, and Xanga. You can also stick it on your blog or Web site, which I've done after the break. The company tells me they're working on integrating better with Google's OpenSocial initiative to make their non-Facebook version a little more robust. They're also working on adding a recommendation feature that will let you share a song you're listening to with any user, similar to what some of the other Facebook music apps have done.
... Read More
There are a few different ways to view music in Contrastream. The first and default view is called "Fresh Albums." This contains new albums that are very active on the site. "Top Hype" contains the albums that are getting the most votes and activity on the site. "Upcoming" and "New Releases" are self explanatory.
Contrastream places an emphasis on keeping the site filled with true indie music. As a result, it has introduced a feature called "Flag as Sell-out." If you think that a band on the site has screwed their fans out of money or has gone too mainstream, then you can flag them as sellouts. If a band/album gets enough of these votes, then they will be taken off of the site. Contrastream's about page details its philosophy, "With a group opinion, those artists won't receive the promotion when other artists deserve it."
Contrastream goes live to the public on September 3, according to TechCrunch, but you can put your e-mail in now and hope for an invite if you just can't wait.
- prev
- 1
- next
