iLike Announces Ad Network and Developer Platform

Today iLike, the leading social music discovery service on the web, announced an ad platform for concert promoters and a music development platform for web developers. The ad platform enables promoters to reach out directly to fans based on location and musical taste. Advertisers can also place their advertisements across iLike’s entire network or Garageband.com, a site primarily targeted to independent bands.

For users of the iLike application, songs can now be listened to as full-length tracks for up to 25 songs per month. While the ad platform is significant, I’m not so sure that listening to 25 full tracks per month provides much of an incentive to use the platform. Developers will have access to iLike and Rhapsody’s entire library of music to embed on their own sites and applications.

This service sounds similar (if not identical) to the soon to be released platform by imeem. Given that the press release states that this new service will be launching in the coming months, I’m guessing that this announcement was intended to attract developer attention of the upcoming API. The company has now surpassed 30 million registered users, making it one of the largest social music services on the web to date.

iLike faces fierce competition from companies like Last.fm, imeem and Qloud which was recently acquired by Buzznet. This space continues to heat up and iLike’s release highlights their rapid growth. I would expect a number of similar announcements to coincide this week with Facebook’s f8 event which could possibly turn out to be the largest event for the social web industry this year.

If you’d like more details about the new iLike ad platform you can visit www.iLike.com/advertise’. Developers can also check out www.iLike.com/developer to be part of the new iLike developer program.