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[Ilike][1] is a new music-based social networking site from the people behind [GarageBand][2] (the website not the Mac app). Ilike aims to expose you to new music based on the music you like now.
Ilike has all the familar trapping of a social networking site, create a profile, various ways to meet new members, upload pictures, and more, but iLike also has some very nice tools for finding new music.
The main tool is the iTunes sidebar. The iLike sidebar is an iTunes plugin that adds a sidebar to your iTunes application and makes music recommendations based on what you're listening to at the time. The sidebar adds a little bit of startup time to iTunes, but once it's running it doesn't seem to add any load to the application. Naturally you must be connected to the internet for the iLike sidebar to work.
There are two categories of recommendation from the iLike sidebar: established artists and new, unsigned artists. When you're listening to a song and you see an iLike recommendation you like just click the arrow beside the name and iLike pauses your iTunes playback and streams the new song from its host site. For the established artists you get a 30 second sample and link to buy the song (from iTunes Music Store).
Music for the unsigned artists comes from iLike's partner site, GarageBand and you can listen to the whole song. If you decide you like the song there's a link that will open your web browser and download the file. It would be nice if iLike could somehow just download the song in the background and automatically add it to your library, but that currently isn't possible (if you use Safari this more or less happens anyway).
iLike accounts offers a sort of privacy control that lets you hide "embarrassing" artists which is a good way to hide that fact that I'm currently rockin' the Dio. Not really. Seriously. I'm not.
The search and recommendations feature is fairly good. I tried throwing a few more obscure artists at it and it was stumped by some them, but it surprised me by finding recommendations for many of them. Interestingly enough, while a few randomly selected Sun Ra tracks turned up nothing in the way of matches, other Sun Ra songs did -- go figure. I suppose as time goes on and more members give more information, the recommended tracks will likely become better.
ILife also claims they will be adding support for other music players in the future (in fact they're openly soliciting programmers to help them if that's your bag).
I will confess to being initially ill-disposed toward iLike and I can take or leave the actual website and social network aspect of the service, but the iTunes sidebar is very slick. It integrates nicely with iTunes and it's a great way to explore both established and new, emerging artists. I try out a lot of stuff for this blog and most of it I forget about a month later, but iLike I might actually keeping around.
[1]: http://www.ilike.com/ "iLike Music Networking site"
[2]: http://garageband.com/ "GarageBand.com"
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