Influx

Last week saw the launch of iLike , an add-on piece of software for iTunes, that brings a social networking element and recommendation engine to the world’s most popular music software.

It allows users to network with their friends, discover what they are listening to and to get music recommendations and free downloads of tracks from unsigned bands.

iLike even caught that attention of Walt Mossberg, his review is here.

Influx got the chance to interview the co-founder of iLike, Ali Partovi.

How did iLike come about? What was its genesis?

We came at it from three directions. First, we’d been running GarageBand.com for a while and had always wanted to create a more consumer-friendly service that also gave unsigned artists a more level playing field. Second, we looked at some of the other music discovery services out there and felt we could make something more simple, more for the average mainstream consumer. Lastly, we admire iPod and MySpace as the two consumer technology icons of the decade, and we were inspired to create something that could add a social ingredient to iPod and a better music-taste-sharing ingredient to MySpace.

What is it about “the timing” that makes it interesting- is there a convergence of trends happening?

We didn’t pick the timing due to any trends — we built and launched it as fast as we could. But we definitely feel like we occupy an exciting position where two big trends converge: user-generated content (the buzzword of the decade), and user-filtered content. We believe
user-generated content becomes far more valuable when it has a well-designed filtering process attached. In a sense, you could describe the entire Internet as user-generated content, and Google as the #1 filter for it (after all, Google’s page-rank algorithm is based on analyzing “votes” in the form of links from one website to another). We hope to be the Google-like filter for music.

How would you describe your target audience?

Ultimately, anybody who loves music. However, we’re particularly targeting the intersection of iPod and MySpace users. iLike is intended for people who love music and who are willing to share info about themselves online. We designed it to be simple and clean — there are
other services out there with more features, but they’re also more complicated. iLike is designed for the mainstream user, not the high-tech early adopter.

MySpace was originally “centered” around music as a social networking “glue” -do you feel that’s changed?

While a lot of people criticize MySpace for one reason or another, I think it’s a fantastic service, and it’s success is an incredible phenomenon. I think MySpace is still very much about music. However, I think the “music discovery” experience on Myspace could be made more effective — as it is, you discover music either by total accident (stumbling on a friend’s page and a song plays) or by spam (bands contact you out of the blue). MySpace’s popularity shows how great the user demand is for discovering music via friends. We believe iLike makes that even easier and more direct, by directly telling you what your friends have on their iPods.