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?

Popularity: 14% [?]

Sitting down to write those first mind-racking band descriptions and introductions on your profile can be very hard. It involves a great deal of thinking, planning, and usually a lot of collaboration with the rest of the band, your friends and family members for ideas and the “right” thing to say. But, rather than worry excessively about what you want to say, you should consider what people want to read about your band.

New Fans and Innate Curiosity

When a new fan visits your site, they likely have three questions in mind:

• What kind of music do you play?
• What are you and the other band-members like?
• How does this affect me?

MySpace provides plenty of space and prompts for you to provide information about what kind of music you play and what kind of band you are. You can upload tracks for them to listen to, list your major influences, and create a series of mini-profiles with information about your band’s members. However, the third question is one of the most important and must be addressed carefully in the descriptions you write.

You might notice that many bands write a very long, involved profile discussing who they are, where they came from and what they see in their music. Other bands simply post a concert calendar and a short bio of 200 words. While a profile that is too long will simply bore readers, one that is too short does not address the question of “how it affects them.”

To address this question, you must write less with the “goal” of your music in mind and more with the “substance”. What do you do that is different from other bands and how do you interact with your fans? Fans want to know that you are an active, fun band. If you know you are going to be traveling a lot and that you will update your blog, respond to fan messages, and listen to requests, write that into your profile. If you want to hear feedback on a track or have a cool idea that you want to run by a large group of people, do it in your profile.

By combining the basic marketing information that all bands include in their profile – origins, influences, and aspirations – with the basic, interactive information that your fans want to hear, you can ensure they know what you want them to know while feeling like stopping by you profile has a positive effect on them.

Popularity: 23% [?]

At least that’s my take on the new MySpace music site reported to be taking shape in the New York Times yesterday.

According to the NYT:

Visitors to the site will be able to listen to free streaming music, paid for with advertising, and share customized playlists with their friends. They will also be able to download tracks to play on their mobile devices, putting the new site in competition with similar services like Apple, Amazon and eMusic. Continue Reading

Popularity: 10% [?]

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

Popularity: 13% [?]

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

Popularity: 27% [?]

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

Popularity: 10% [?]

The Internet has too many social networks already. It is full of blogs, social bookmarking sites, and clever little Web 2.0 outlets that allow you to interact with people all over the world. Basically, if someone thought of something that could be done on the Internet, at least one person has tried to create a social network to make it happen. The result is a massive web of sites that are generally all very similar, but still quite powerful.

That’s why, when you first look at Squidoo, it appears to be much like every other website you have encountered while trying to market your music. It allows you to quickly and freely start your own page – called a lens – and blog about that topic. You can gather friends, comment on other lenses, and vote on how effective they are – but somehow Squidoo is much different and for someone looking to stretch a little and find new fans, different is absolutely necessary.

First, a Squidoo lens is created with the notion that it will make money. People do not create these sites just because they want to share their thoughts on something – they create them because they feel they are an expert in a certain field and can share their expertise for a general profit. This is bolstered by the inclusion of affiliate links to dozens of different services.

Say for example you want to create a lens about Monty Python. After creating that lens, you could include all of the following on the page for potential readers:

• An Amazon Plexo (listing of top products that readers can vote on) with 10-20 products.
• Ticket sales for Broadway shows.
• Google AdSense
• Targeted offers from other lenses
• Paid banner ads from major companies
• Gift ideas and links

And dozens of other possible inclusions, if you have the space for it. That’s not to say that a Squidoo lens is only for money making. It’s a marketer’s dream and the money making opportunities are only small tools to help that goal along.

For the prospective musician, the possibilities can grow even larger. Too many musicians and artists assume that everything they do in their marketing campaign must be focused on making their name bigger and reaching new audiences, but just as much good can be done simply by creating a presence for you as an individual on the Internet.

If your band falls into a specific genre or has a specific sound that you want to relay to your fans, create a lens in Squidoo that allows you to show just how much you know about that sound. Talk about your favorite bands – their histories, their members, and their albums. Talk about shows that are coming up, new bands in the genre, and of course your own band.

By combining the best of what you aspire to be and what you actually are, you can promote yourself through an exploding market. Not only that, but you can add your own show tickets, albums, and merchandise to the lens and sell them, making additional profits and spreading your music at the same time. With a couple of hours invested in writing about something you are already passionate about, you will have created a portal that can bring thousands of new fans to your MySpace profile, your shows, and – if you are lucky – the box office.

Popularity: 7% [?]

The folks over at ELECTROGARDEN.com moved their site into its next phase yesterday when they announced they’ve finished more than a year’s worth of beta testing and design.

Although they’ve been around since 1999, we have yet to see whether this site will be able to attract listeners and fans over and above artists themselves.

Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s PRWeb release: Continue Reading

Popularity: 9% [?]