iLike Introduces New Facebook Musician Platform

The online music service known as iLike owes much of its recent success to social networking service Facebook, which developers at iLike developed an app for shortly after the launch of the Facebook Platform.

Now, iLike wants to make integration between Facebook and its service as easy and effortless as possible for the musicians who mantain profiles. The new Artist Services Platform provides music artists with one artist page to maintain across both iLike & Facebook and claims to make it “easier to get fans than on MySpace.”

With the new service, musicians will now have the ability to upload songs, add upcoming performances and events, and communicate directly with fans. Artists even have the option to add audio, video or text to their sites with camera phones when a computer may not be accessible.

In addition, artists get a stat tracking tool which can show fan growth, play counts for each uploaded song, as well as the number of times a song has been added to other users' profiles.

The iLike Artist Services Platform looks very promising, and should be well accepted, considering how fast-paced and number-driven the music industry has become. I say fast-paced because this tool essentially cuts out a time-consuming part of the setup process since it manages pages at both services. I say number-driven because the statistics feature is crucial and without it, musicians may not be willing to embrace the service without some way to track the results.

Apparently Sony/BMG is already adopting the iLike artist platform, as iLike has already received the following positive feedback:

“We TOTALLY get it. Since iLike has all the features we're looking for (without Facebook's 5,000-friend limit) we can just use the iLike artist dashboard - we have no reason to build separate Facebook profile pages for our artists.” Billie Jean Sarullo, Sony/BMG/Red

With more than 13 millions users now and over 8 million of those on Facebook, it looks like iLike is set for continued growth and adoption among the music commuity. I am not quite sure that they have the next MTV though.