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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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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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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Back from a month’s worth of vacation and what better way to get back into the game with than a post about a (very?) successful viral marketing effort by California based A Cursive Memory.

I stumbled across this campaign in a post titled ‘Music Videos and Viral Marketing‘ from the folks at musicmarketing.com.

Check out the post (and the band) for yourself, but these guys have hit on a great viral concept. It’s unique, funny, interesting, and clever enough that I’ve shared it with all my friends, and you probably will too. That’s the goal when you’re trying to come up with a viral concept. You want to create content that viewers can’t resist sharing with their friends, who share it with their friends, and on and on it goes…

Have you had success promoting your music with viral marketing, viral video or social networking? Enter the maxlowe.net Socially Awesome Band of the Week contest and you could win a FREE downloadable copy of my Ultimate Guide to Promoting Your Music Online eBook! Winners will be announced every Monday morning starting March 3rd, 2008.

If you’ve tried viral marketing, but haven’t quite managed to make it work for you, I’d like to hear about that too! Leave your story in the comments below and you can get valuable feedback (and exposure) for your efforts.

On another note, I’m back in the blogosphere after a much needed break! My apologies to anyone who has been waiting with baited breath for updates over the last couple of weeks. Expect regular updates to resume today!

Thanks for sticking around!

- Max

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The Internet is a great tool to spread your music and the idea that you want to make money from it is of course first and foremost in any musician’s mind. But, there has been a recent kick lately from major artists around the world such as Prince and Radiohead to give away their music and it might have you a little nervous about the future of the music industry and the viability of making money online with your music. Continue Reading

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The Internet is a whole new world of promotional opportunities. Essentially everything you thought you knew about the business can be thrown out the window when you log into MySpace or any of a dozen other social networks to find new fans. Those bands that fail to make the essential adjustment are doomed to fail until they realize just how different everything is. For the rest of you, here are 5 essential tips that help you look beyond the basics of Music Marketing to find what you can really accomplish online. Continue Reading

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