Woke up to this message from iLike in my inbox this morning.

We wanted our artist community to be among the very first to hear officially that MySpace has entered into an agreement to acquire iLike.

We’re sure you have a ton of questions, most importantly: How will this affect me or the artist/band I manage?

• First off, you can count on business as usual: The iLike Artist Dashboard, website and apps will continue to operate as always – except that they’re going to get even better in the weeks and months to come.
• Our friends at MySpace share our commitment to helping fans discover your content and connect with you online. Together we hope to make our social music discovery platform even more powerful. Most artists manage their online artist presence via a MySpace page and separately via the iLike Artist dashboard. These two dashboards give you access to fans across all the biggest social networks. It’s an obvious opportunity for us to integrate these services to give you easier technology and access to more fans. We expect to announce some cool new features and integrations in the future.

And that’s not the only big iLike development in the last few days. iLike is now enabling music fans who discover and share your music on iLike.com to purchase songs and albums (in MP3 format) in-page directly from us.

Our download service provides a smooth, immediate in-page purchase experience. Fans can sign up, enter their credit card, and download music without ever leaving the page they discovered your music on. We think the speed and convenience of our service will spur music sales.

We’re delighted to be selling music from all the major labels and hundreds of indie labels through our partnership with MediaNet. We’ve heard loud and clear from lots of independent artists who want to find ways to sell their music directly. We have nothing to announce about this yet, but your feedback has been heard, just give us some time.

Our MP3 download service is currently in Beta, meaning that it’s an early preview, we’ll improve it rapidly as we get feedback from fans and artists. We’ll also make it available on iLike’s applications on leading social networks. Our goal over time is to offer music fans the ability to impulse buy in-page from wherever they are.

Change is exciting, but we know it can also cause anxiety – even when the developments are good. We’ll continue to update you when there is anything new or noteworthy to share. We value your ongoing support and we welcome your feedback.

Sincerely,
Ali & Hadi Partovi, co-founders, iLike

I’ve had mixed success promoting my artists’ music with iLike but this is a good buy for Myspace. The big question everyone’s asking…what does this mean for iLike and Facebook?

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I was cruising through some of Jimmy Shelter’s posts this morning. If you haven’t been to Jimmy’s blog recently, you should check it out. He has a great collection of resources for do-it-yourself indie music marketing.

In his Band Promotion Links IV post, Jimmy links to a really important article by Ariel Hyatt posted at musicthinktank.com (check it out). Ariel talks about Twitter, and how it’s a great tool to use for reaching new fans and making industry contacts.

Don’t underestimate the power of Twitter. If you happened to be watching Twitter’s election pages after Obama’s big win, you would have been amazed at the volume of ‘tweets’ that were rolling down the page, and the stories that were being told with just a few characters of text.

This is what you want to achieve with Twitter. No, I’m not talking about thousands of messages, but messages that help you tell a story about your act – to build a relationship with people who are following you and create a unique and interesting reason for them to care about who you are and what you do.

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You’ve probably heard the term “viral marketing” more than a few times in the past. It’s bandied about enough these days. It is an extremely important and highly viable means by which you can actively engage an audience well beyond your own. Unfortunately, it is also very hard to know when a viral marketing concept will actually be successful. It might take multiple tries and repeated trial and error to be sure something will work. Continue Reading

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When social networking was originally created in the 1990s, no one knew that it would become the indelibly powerful marketing force that it now is. The growth of new technologies in the early 2000s made it possible for sites like MySpace to become so incredibly massive that their populations would rank them amongst the top 10 most populous nations in the world. Continue Reading

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So, you’ve decided to create a blog on MySpace – one of the single most effective ways to draw an audience to your profile. Before you get started, it is important that you know exactly what seven things you can do to ensure that crowd shows up though – otherwise, you will be left scratching your head at the lack of views: Continue Reading

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In case you haven’t already caught on, YouTube launched their Insight service on Wednesday and it has some rich potential for you if you do any viral or other video promotion of your music.

This post on the YouTube blog announcing the Insight release describes the analytics service as “a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site.” Continue Reading

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Kevin Kelly has published the most up to date and articulate expression of the economics behind the new music industry I can find anywhere.

In his post titled ‘1000 True Fans’, Kelly puts the power of social networking into dollar terms for your band. Continue Reading

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I’ve been meaning to write a post about the essential steps to the bigger ’system’ of the new music industry, not just the online component that we talk about alot on this blog.Turns out Jimmy Shelter has already said it better than I ever could. Continue Reading

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