iLike was an online service that allowed users to download and share music. Founded by brothers Ali Partovi and Hadi Partovi, the website made use of a sidebar that is used with Apple's

iTunes iTunes is a media player, media library, and mobile device management (MDM) utility developed by Apple. It is used to purchase, play, download and organize digital multimedia on personal computers running the macOS and Windows operating s ...

or Microsoft's

Windows Media Player Windows Media Player (WMP, officially referred to as Windows Media Player Legacy to retronym, distinguish it from Windows Media Player (2022), the new Windows Media Player introduced with Windows 11) is the first media player (application soft ...

. The program and sidebar are not required to use the site but allow for ease in discovering new artists. The site attracted around half a million users in the first four months after it was launched. According to the latest statements by the company, over 60 million consumers registered to use iLike either directly on iLike.com or using the apps built by iLike for third-party social networks such as

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

. iLike also built a "post-once publish-everywhere" dashboard for artists – major label artists as well as independent artists. In October 2007, iLike announced that it was teaming up with ''

Billboard A billboard (also called a hoarding in the UK and many other parts of the world) is a large outdoor advertising structure (a billing board), typically found in high-traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large advertis ...

'' to create new charts that display the week's top 25 "most added" songs to personal music libraries. On August 19, 2009, it was announced that

MySpace Myspace (formerly stylized as MySpace, currently myspace; and sometimes my␣, with an elongated Whitespace character#Substitute images, open box symbol) is a social networking service based in the United States. Launched on August 1, 2003, it w ...

was to acquire iLike. As of February 7, 2012, the iLike website has been closed and instead redirects users to a special MySpace Music page which displays a banner announcing the closure.

Funding

iLike received private funding from contributors including

Ticketmaster Ticketmaster Entertainment, LLC is an American ticket sales and distribution company based in Beverly Hills, California, with operations in many countries around the world. In 2010, it merged with Live Nation under the name Live Nation Ente ...

Khosla Ventures Khosla Ventures is a private American venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California. It was founded by entrepreneur Vinod Khosla in 2004. The firm works with early-stage companies in the Internet, computing, mobile technology, artifici ...

, Bob Pittman as well as various other investors.

Facebook Application

iLike had a free

application which allowed users to play clips of music they like on their profile, show concerts they are going to and play a music trivia quiz. The application had great success after its release, making it one of the most popular applications on the Facebook Platform. As of November 2007, iLike had more than 15 million users. With the launch of Facebook Pages, iLike created pages for bands. A similar feature was also available for the Bebo network. In April 2009, iLike renamed this application to simply "Music" to maintain consistency with other Facebook apps. The website and Facebook app no longer exist.

Acquisition talks by Apple

In 2008, iLike's founders were in talks for Apple to acquire it. Ali Partovi, Hadi Partovi, and Nat Brown from iLike met with

Steve Jobs Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known for co-founding the technology company Apple Inc. Jobs was also the founder of NeXT and chairman and majority shareholder o ...

and

Eddy Cue Eduardo H. Cue (born October 23, 1964) is Apple Inc., Apple's senior vice president of Services, reporting to CEO Tim Cook. Cue oversees Apple's numerous content stores and products including the iTunes Store, the Apple Books Store, and Apple ...

from Apple. Jobs was impressed by the product and team, and offered to buy the company for $50 million. Ali Partovi insisted "I think ... I ''know'' we’re worth three times as much," a deception that Jobs' picked up on and caused negotiations to end. In 2009, iLike sold for a lower valuation to MySpace.

References

External links

iLike Team Blog

Billboard.com iLike Libraries: Most Added

Interview with Ali Partovi, CEO and founder of iLike – Intruders tv
video {{DEFAULTSORT:Ilike Myspace Internet properties established in 2006 Internet properties disestablished in 2012 American music websites Hadi Partovi