iLike, which launches today, is a new music-sharing community from the makers of Garageband.com. Nope, neither of these are Apple products, but iLike features integration with iTunes and the iPod via a plugin that will automatically organize your music into playlists, help you discover free music and connect with others through the iLike site.
The San Francisco-based company consists largely of ex-Microsoft employees, and boasts $2.5 million in funding from Khosla Ventures and MTV co-founder Bob Pitman, among others. Garageband, you might know, is an indie music community, and the free music on iLike originates from there. Both these products sound confusingly similar to Apple's offerings, and it may have been wise to choose something more unique.
That said, iLike is pretty good. The iTunes plugin works in a similar way to the one from MOG - auto-updating your online profile based on the music you play on iTunes and your iPod. But there's also a lot you can do within iTunes itself: find artists like the one you're listening to, set up an automated playlist by seeding it with a track you like, see what your friends are playing, sample music that you might want to buy and download free music from the indie artists on GarageBand. The plugin works on both Windows XP and the Mac. If you don't use iTunes, you can enter your musical tastes manually on the site.
Although the iLike interface seems underwhelming at first, they've actually done a very good job. It's a strong entrant into this space. That said, the social music space is an active one, with MOG, ProjectOpus, Finetune, Philafunk and MusicHawk among the contenders.
[via GigaOm]
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