The Wall Street Journal got the scoop that Ticketmaster has agreed to buy a 25% stake in the music community iLike for $13.3 million - that puts iLike's valuation at a whopping $53 million. Just like yesterday's story about FanNation being valued at $60 million, that's hard to believe, and makes you wonder whether the tech bubble is inflating once again.
There are, however, some synergies: Ticketmaster want to link to iLike to help their visitors learn about the bands on their site, and iLike will insert links to buy a band's concert tickets over on Ticketmaster. iLike is a spin-off of Garageband.com, which raised $2.5 million in funding earlier this year from Khosla Ventures and MTV co-founder Bob Pitman, among others.
Mashable was one of the first to cover iLike's launch back in October, and the review was favorable. The core feature is the ability to auto-update your profile based on the music you play on iTunes and your iPod - it's very similar to MOG, another new music community that received a positive review here. Other new music communities include ProjectOpus, Finetune, Philafunk and MusicHawk.
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