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Posts Tagged ‘Music Services’

Apple Has Acquired Lala

Earlier today we covered rumors that Apple was in talks to acquire streaming music service Lala. Now New York Times tech reporter Brad Stone has tweeted that it’s a done deal. He writes, “Apple has acquired digital music startup Lala. Now updating our story”. You can find the NYT story here.

This could be bad news for Lala users. It’s unlikely that the innovative deals negotiated by Lala will survive through the acquisition. For over a year, Lala users have been purchasing the rights to stream their music an unlimited number of times for ten cents per song. If the deals with the music labels go up in smoke, Lala may lose the right to stream those songs. In other words, all the money users have been spending on web songs may go down the drain. If the deals are nullified, hopefully Apple will renegotiate them to at least cover existing purchases until it releases its own streaming music service. We’ve reached out to Lala but have yet to hear back.

Likewise, this may well affect the Lala music gifts that have been recently offered by Facebook, and it could also harm the Music OneBox service Google recently launched (though Google can still rely on MySpace/iLike for its song streams).

Stone writes that Apple is interested in Lala because of its engineering talent and technology, and that it was Lala that initiated the discussions. From the Times:

One person with knowledge of the deal, but who was not authorized to discuss it, said that the negotiations originated when Lala executives concluded that their prospects for turning a profit in the short term were dim and initiated discussions with Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president in charge of iTunes.

This person said Apple would primarily be buying Lala’s engineers, including its energetic co-founder Bill Nguyen, and their experience with cloud-based music services.

The deal makes sense. It seems inevitable that Apple will eventually launch its own cloud-based streaming music service. And that’s exactly what Lala is — an iTunes in the cloud, with some interesting pricing mechanics.

A few other interesting things to note. This acquisition comes a little more than a month after Lala was integrated into Google’s OneBox and Facebook’s gift store. Lala may well have been viewing these launches as last-chance efforts to find a path to profitability. Given these reports that Lala’s “prospects for turning a profit in the short term were dim”, it looks like those launches may not have gone as well as Lala hoped.

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Future of Music Coalition’s Brian Zisk: The Do’s of Streaming Music

In 2008 the idea of another subscription-only music service was enough to get your knickers in a torrent. Sure Rhapsody was doing well, but they’d been around for forever and in 2008, freemium was the music model du jour. With a year to reflect, co-founder of the Future of Music Coalition and longtime San Fran Music Tech Summit organizer Brian Zisk tells us what it takes to survive in today’s music environment.

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In August 2008 ReadWriteWeb asked What Would the Perfect Streaming Music Service Look Like? While Pandora, Imeem and Muxtape were mentioned, services like MOG’s All Access, Spotify and Rdio hadn’t even been hatched. Given what appears to be a major shift in the industry, we asked Zisk to weigh in on some of these upcoming features:

RWW: A number of companies are offering cheap all-you-can-eat music services where users pay a set price for unlimited playback and streams. How important is price in this instance?
While price and large catalogues are important, having full songs goes without saying as the most important feature. People will pay for convenience and I personally am not interested in a service that only lets me play the entirety of a few songs and then forces me to listen to 30 second clips.

RWW:The killer mobile music application appears to offer offline caching of streams. Is this a make or break feature for streaming music services?
It’s important to have a killer mobile app or device integration, but as connectivity improves, I’m not sure just how important offline caching will be.

RWW: While some services offer a community curation feature, it’s a select few (Hype Machine being one of them) that manage to maintain a sense of cool. How important is curated discovery?
I don’t think this will be the most important feature of a service, but I could be wrong. I mean, how many folks would listen to the Village Voice Annual Picks or the Amoeba Records picks even if they were available online?

RWW: If not through editors, then how do you like to discover new music?
One of the features that I love is the ability to drill down into the music any way you want. For example, with Spotify you can search on a band and find their albums, and then start listening to their body of work chronologically. From there, you can choose whatever song you like, listen to it again and again, and then pivot on that song to hear versions from the other folks who have played that same song.

RWW:And what about social features?
Zisk:Lala’s feature where you see what your friends are listening to is cool, but I think the social aspect or the curated aspect is more important to others than it is to me. While I think it matters on a favorites level as in “You have to hear this band”, I don’t know how deep it actually reaches. I wonder if folks don’t already feel like they hear what they want from a radio station or recommendation-based radio like Pandora.

Zisk is hosting a SF Music Tech mixer tonight as a precursor to his Dec 7 San Fran Music Tech Summit. To register for the event visit sfmtsmixer.eventbrite.com.

Photo Credit: Rossina Bossio Bossa

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Deezer Raises $9.5 Million More For Free Music Search And Streaming Service
Music search and discovery engine Deezer has raised €6.5 million ($9.6 million) in a second round of financing, bringing the total amount invested in the French upstart to approx. €12.2 million ($18 million). The additional capital was raised from from AGF Private Equity and CM-CIC Capital Privé, thus joining the historical shareholders who make up the DOTCORP Asset Management funds.

Deezer is one of the most popular music services in Europe. Formerly known as BlogMusik, it ran into lots of legal trouble when it launched its free music streaming service a couple of years ago. However, unlike many other ventures of the kind the startup turned itself around, reached essential agreements with copyright associations, and ultimately relaunched as a ‘legitimately’ free music search engine back in August 2007.

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Your Guide to Music on the Web, Part II

Last month, I published Part 1 of my Guide To Music On The Web, which covered music recommendation sites, Web radio, independent music sites, playlists, and music visualizations. Today, in Part II we’ll take a tour of music search engines, Web players, ways to share music on Twitter, and music mixing apps.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading all of your comments and insights on my previous post and of course, took them under consideration while creating this second part. Please bear in mind that I can’t list ALL the music applications out there. I really tried to find the best and the most used applications that will probably still be here to serve you tomorrow too.

So readers’ main concern was the companies’ business model. You are right. A few of the services might make an exit, and most of them are probably not going to have one, and some are just for fun. I think music services can make money by being innovative enough to get it. Anyway, I don’t want to get into the business model stuff too much, but I will tell you this: The Internet is too competitive, you may be succeed by just being simple, but you may also need to be sophisticated. The era where creating an application first, then two years later thinking how to make money from it, is bygone now, and companies will need to think how to make money sooner than later if they aim for it – This is where innovation comes in and usually wins.

Music Search Engine:

Back in 2007, SkreemR was truly my favorite MP3 search engine. SkreemR locates MP3 files on blogs and webpages, then indexes them on its site, allowing anyone to listen to their favorite music right on the spot. There is no registration required, all you need to do is to search for your desired song/artist, and browse the results. See something that you like? You can play it, rate it, buy it on Amazon, get the song lyrics, watch the video, find related photos on flickr, find concert tickets, download as a ringtone, and finally – yes – you can also share and tweet about it. Unfortunately, now SkreemR has jumping ads all over the site. I understand the need to make money, but did they have to choose the most annoying way to achieve that goal?

I remember the hype around Songza when it first launched… it is a slick Ajax-designed service, which makes it easy to stream music on the web. Well, it still does. Songza became popular for its great usability and the fact that you can easily create playlists, and share music with your friends. At first Songza aggregated music from Seeqpod, then switched to YouTube videos and imeem (where imeem = 30 seconds of a song, and Youtube = full video, low quality). Somewhere around October 2008, the service was acquired by Amie Street for its marketing potential.

Another acquired service is FoxyTunes, this time by Yahoo! in February 2008. FoxyTunes Firefox toolbar extension (launched in 2004) enables control of your favorite music player from the Firefox browser. It supports almost any media player and lets you also find lyrics, covers, videos, bios and much more – all from the comfort of your browser. Today, it has more than 50,000 weekly downloads, and a cumulative total of nearly 11,000,000 downloads! FoxyTunes also released an additional add-on called TwittyTunes, which allows you to post your currently playing songs to Twitter with a click. On their behalf I have to say, they where the first to offer that. Their search engine: FoxyTunes Planet, is a mashup Netvibes-like page, that gathers music information from Rhapsody, Yahoo!, Flickr, Last.fm, Youtube, Pandora, Amazon, and more.

I sure noticed the difference when I tried Mufin. Looks like they put an emphasis on the site’s usability and design. The interface is so clean and easy to use. Like other services, Mufin will search for your favorite music and will play it on the spot, via Youtube (what else?) It also lets you create playlists in a snap. But what makes it unique is its visualization tool (vision) that lets you discover more music, based on similar artists. Mufin also provides a player which can be downloaded to your desktop for free. The player will help you organize your music, create playlists, find similar music, share tracks with friends on Last.fm, Twitter or Facebook, and so much more.

Fizy’s search engine has no special feature really, it’s just built really well. The service has a simple look & feel, which allows you to listen to music that streams from Youtube, and create playlists if you are logged in. You can connect your Twitter, Friendfeed or Facebook accounts, and share with your friends’ music in realtime. There’s not much to say other than that.

Qloud has quite an impressive history since they launched way back in 2006; At first, it was just a plug-in allowing you to organize your own library better, so you would be able to find the right song at the right time. Then Qloud released ‘My-Music’: A music app for social networks (Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Myspace, etc), which led them to 1M Facebook users! And finally today, it’s all of the above, plus a real-time music search engine, and a pretty good one. You can search and find music that you like, save and organize your favorites, share music with friends, or find new friends based on shared music taste. You can also import your iTunes or Windows Media Player library, and play your playlist directly from your browser. There’s a rumor that Qloud was acquired by Buzznet last year, but I couldn’t find any formal confirmation about this at either site (Qloud or Buznet).

And finally MySpace Music: A massive hub of free music on the web. MySpace Music gathers all of its music accounts into one searchable page by genre. You can see the entire discography of your favorite artists from anywhere on the globe: view the artists’ music pages, listen to their music, track local concerts and much more. You can also search entire collections of free-to-watch video uploaded by artists or users. Read reviews by users, blog posts by both users and artists, and basically dive into an endless amount of content. Addictive.

Worth mentioning: Wearehunted, which is a playable chart of the most popular songs on the Web..

Web Players:

From your Desktop to the Web, Moof allows you to have a full back up of your own music. Export an xml file of your iTunes library, and listen to your favorite music from any computer. If you don’t want to do that, you can still browse through the Moof music library and play any song you like on-demand from the Web. Moof looks and behaves like a desktop player, with the additional ability to share and see music from friends. If your friends are on Moof, you can browse their entire collection of music, and add favorites to your own personal library. Overall, it’s a great way to find new music. Note that Moof has the coolest registration form ever

Spool.fm is so awesome, but fails to explain the service to its users. What you see when you enter the site is a Web Music Player that lets you find the music you want, then play it right away. What you don’t see is the powerful feature that allows you to see what your friends are listening to in real-time! How it works: Just sign up for the service, invite your friends to join in, and each time you play music on the site, your friends will be able to see what you’re listening to as you listen to it, and vice versa. The music streams from all kinds of free sources—not Youtube.

Like most of the Web Players, Grooveshark allows users to find any song in the world and listen to it instantly. But there are several things that makes it different than the rest; first off, the application’s UI is stunning, and the experience using this site is absolutely a joy. Other than that, there’s so much that you can do: search, find, organize, favorite and add music that you like. Also interact with people in the community, and discover new music from others’ choices. With a team of 40 people they must have a business model (or a lot of VC cash).  Grooveshark has a paid VIP version with some exclusive features, and a special interface for VIP users ($3/month or $30/year)

Youtube probably has the largest music database in the Internet, but finding music can be very frustrating since it’s not well organized. I’ve already recommended Jogli as a service that gathers Youtube music into albums in the first part of this guide. JukeFly does the same but also lets you listen to the music as if it was on your desktop music player, only it’s on the Web. JukeFly prepares everything for you, so you don’t really need to create playlists, you just need to choose from a variety of content already made for you. Additionally, JukeFly can stream music from your desktop, but you’ll have to download their plug-in to be able to do so. The player has more features and functionality, which you may or may not need, so don’t be surprised if eventually you find yourself using it as your new music center on the Web. JukeFly is working on a newer version, which will include an iPhone app, concert information, chat, fan-clubs, and Internet radio.

MixTape.me searches an entire database of songs in addition to the millions of songs indexed by MP3 search engine SkreemR to bring you the best results possible. If you sign up for the service you will be able to save your favorite songs, create playlists by simply dragging & dropping tracks into a box, and share playlists with anyone. Users can upload custom album art to any playlist, then embed the playlist at their blog/site. All from a sexy web interface.

How disappointing is it to find out that Lala works only in the U.S when everyone keeps telling me how great this service is… Anyway, I can give you a brief overview of the service from the information I picked up on the site. Windows users can move their entire music collection from the desktop to Lala on the web. Most of your music will be matched to Lala’s catalog and will be available online in minutes; The rest and unmatched music can be uploaded to Lala. If your personal music collection is not enough, you can play over 7 million songs once for free. If you’d like to add songs to your collection, it’ll cost 10 cents per song, and your first 25 songs are free.

JustHearIt plays music over a nicely done application with a great visual experience. The application was created by two students trying to change the stereotype that access to free music is an illegal activity while immersing the user in a unique visual experience. So what can you do at the site? You can listen to music you like, create online music collections & multiple playlists, and hopefully share favorite tracks with friends (it doesn’t say this anywhere, but I presume it does) – not much different from the rest of the services here, except for its nifty UI. BTW, even with their goal to show the world that music can be free and legal, they use Youtube like most services, so I’m not sure what’s unique about that.

Since Seeqpod.com’s service is mostly dead, every service that used them switched to Youtube instead. The pros: Its video ability. The cons: The music quality (but hey, at least we have free music). Same applies to Streamzy, an Ajax-based media player that lives on the web and allows users to create quick playlists from their favorite music. Streamzy says it merely provides search results for media being hosted elsewhere on the Internet – Well, I can’t argue with that. Anyhow, sign in if you want to save playlist, or use it as an alternative music player occasionally.

Post Music on Twitter:

Blip.fm is by far my favorite Twitter music service.  It is also the first service that allowed people to send music to twitter in a very easy way, which is what made it what it is today. What makes it so great is that you can use it with or without a Twitter account. Some use it via the Twitter connection, other use it as their main music playlist and enjoy the community within the site only. Anyhow, you can discover new music, and new friends based on your collections. Once you sign up to the site, you can set Twitter to send notifications each time you suggest a new song to friends. It looks like Twitter, it behaves like Twitter, but angled around music only.

Grooveshark’s project Twisten.fm, came out a bit later than Blip.fm and offers pretty much the same service. Sign-up with your Twitter credentials, and share music with your friends on Twitter. The site streams music from Grooveshark, allowing you to enjoy the quality of music played there (blip.fm streams music mostly from Youtube). Overall, it’s a cool place to save your music into playlists, and share directly with your Twitter friends. I wish that both Blip.fm & Twisten.fm would allow people to buy mixed CDs created from their playlist, instead of having to buy each song separately.

Funnel is the new kid on the block, basically the same as Blip.fm and Twisten.fm except with a killer tool—a nifty Bookmarklet! While you play songs on Youtube or Myspace, you can immediately add them to your playlist in Funnel. Another unparalleled feature is the ability to integrate your Twitter account or Tweet only the songs that you want. This way, you don’t feel bad about inundating your Twitter stream with too many of those annoying music updates. Also, you can easily comment on songs that you like.

If you wish to share MP3 links with your Twitter friends, you can do it with the help of Song.ly. Enter an MP3 link, and Song.ly will generate a small player for easy listening over the web. I have to admit that the whole process is somewhat an unnecessary hassle.  After all, who’s uploading songs these days when everything is searchable on the web already? On the other hand, you can enjoy a list of songs that’s already been uploaded by others, and are of very good quality, of course. I’d summarize it as a user generated MP3 search engine.

Another successful service, is Twt.fm which finds music that you like and posts it to Twitter in a cool way. All you need to do is to log in via Twitter, type in an artist/track and click preview. Twt.fm then generates a track page using your Twitter page design. Post it on Twitter and your friends will be able to leave you comments on the same page – Example.

Worth mentioning: Listento.fm, and Twones.

Mix & Share:

Not a pure mix service but it still falls into this category, 8tracks allows you to create a Mix (playlist) with your favorite songs. It’s actually very similar to a service that already shut down, Mixwit—so if you missed it, you might as well try 8tracks. Once you sign up to the service you can start searching for music, or uploading it from your computer to build your Mix. You can publish a Mix of no more than 8 tracks and only two of these can be from the same artist. Visitors at the site can listen to Mixes without signing into the service—but for creation and music uploads, you’ll have to become a member.

A fun service to close the list with, Jamglue brings music and fans together. Any artist can sign up for a free Jamglue account and upload music in multi-track format for others to remix. There are several Creative Commons licenses to choose from.  These licenses allow others to share and remix work, as long as they follow the artist’s restrictions. Fans can remix other folks’ stuff, and share the results.

Conclusion:
To summarize this whole guide, I have to admit that I’m somewhat concerned: Let’s say Youtube closes its doors tomorrow or decides to stop streaming music—there goes about 80% of what I’ve listed. Which brings me to my next point, the future of music on the Web doesn’t looks so bright right now. Not if every service depends on Youtube so heavily as its music source. For once, I wouldn’t mind paying a yearly fee if it meant listening to an unlimited source of any music that I like with good streaming & with awesome quality. And, I don’t even need to download the songs to my computer, all I really want is a place where I can play my favorite music based on monthly/year fee.  Is it too much to ask?  Oh wait, this is exactly what Rhapsody offers; Unfortunately, only in the U.S. . . .

For now, I suggest you try the services above and enjoy them as long as they last. For some reason, music services don’t stay around very long but I guess that’s the way they roll.

Since I can’t list them all, please feel free to add services that I’ve missed in your comments and make them handy for everyone.

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Twones: Delicious for Streaming Music

If you’re the kind of music lover with playlists strewn across multiple web services, then Twones is the tool for you. Twones is best described as Delicious or Friendfeed for streaming music. The early beta site allows users to bookmark and organize music from more than 23 music services including Last.fm, Hype Machine, MOG and even MySpace. The company offers an audio footprint of where you’ve been and once you install the Firefox toolbar, it will also track where you’re going.

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Upon downloading the toolbar, users are given the opportunity to bookmark their favorite music on the sites that they already use. From here, file links are automatically created within Twones and listeners can revisit the same bookmarks for streaming playback. In addition to offering the ability play back songs, the site also offers a variety of information on your favorite bands including news, YouTube clips, upcoming gigs, articles and photos. Another feature is a Last.fm-style recommendation system to suggest new artists for exploration. If you’d like to find new music from community members, you can also click on the “On Air” or “Popular” buttons to get a taste of what’s being played across the web.

Says co-founder Tim Heineke,”In the next month Twones will release a real time activity gadget where users can embed their playlists into social networking sites and blogs.” Once this happens, users can listen to whatever they like and the tracker will automatically update sidebars, home pages and Facebook walls. Other future plans include expanding the number of services that Twones pulls from and exploring the possibility of importing 3rd party playlists created prior to Twones toolbar installation.

Only 500 lucky ReadWriteWeb readers will get a chance to check out this invite-only site. To try the service, visit Twones.com and enter the code: RWW09.

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Real Networks submitting Rhapsody music service for iPhone. Duck!

Filed under: Audio, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

Now this will be interesting to watch. RealNetworks, not always best of friends with Apple, is submitting an iPhone app so subscribers can access the Rhapsody music service.

The app is designed to be full-featured, and will let Rhapsody subscribers get easy control of the on-demand music service. Real Networks has described the app’s operation on its Rhapsody blog:

You’ll see a menu bar across the bottom of the screen, as is found in many apps. You’ll have the option to check out the queue, your library, browse the Rhapsody library (ahem, all 8 million + songs of it), search, and settings. The app has all the functionality of the client, or Rhapsody.com, only super portable.

The Rhapsody app is designed to stream music over 3G, EDGE or Wi-Fi networks. If approved, it will require a Rhapsody To Go account, which is US$15.00 per month. Spotify, a similar European music service, also has an app awaiting approval for the iPhone.

Apple already allows the Sirius/XM app, which is a different, but still a paid subscription service, and of course Pandora, Last.fm and other streaming music services.

All these apps are competition to iTunes, so the world will be watching to see if Apple draws the line with RealNetworks, or keeping a careful eye on the FCC, approves it.

TUAWReal Networks submitting Rhapsody music service for iPhone. Duck! originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Top 10 Most Exciting Web Apps or Services

Yesterday we asked what 3 web apps or services you find the most exciting right now. Not your 3 most used or favorite, but the apps that currently make you tingly with excitement. We got some great responses in the comments, so in this post we pick out our top 10 from your choices.

We’ve chosen the 10 in two batches. Firstly, the services that got the most number of mentions. As expected, these are well known apps that millions of people are using (or will use when it’s launched, in the case of Google Wave). We didn’t want this to be purely a popularity contest though, so we’ve also selected 5 lesser known web apps or services. Those apps all got multiple mentions and in our estimation they’re each worthy of being labeled ‘exciting.’

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Note: we offer the full list of apps voted for at the bottom of this post.

Top 5 Apps

1. Twitter 25 votes
2. Gmail 17 votes
3. Google Reader 11 votes
4. Google Wave 11 votes
5. Facebook 6 votes

This was fairly predictable, with Twitter well out in front. There’s been such excitement and activity around Twitter this year, that nobody could really argue against Twitter being the most exciting web or service around in 2009.

Twitter was followed by no less than 3 Google products, one of them as yet unreleased! (Google Wave). This shows that Google still has that aura of being ‘exciting,’ at least with ReadWriteWeb’s early adopter readers.

Facebook slipped in at number 5, so it too seems to have kept up its reputation for being innovative.

Top 5 Lesser Known Apps

6. Spotify (RWW coverage): this Swedish online music app is about to launch in the U.S. and is highly anticipated by that market. It’s so exciting that we’ve predicted it may even threaten Apple’s near monopoly iTunes product. We’ll have to wait and see what happens on that front, but Spotify certainly has a lot of people salivating! Other online music services mentioned multiple times in our poll were Blip.fm and last.fm.

7. Dropbox: this was listed as one of ReadWriteWeb’s 5 Favorite Online Storage Services in September last year. At the time it had only just opened to the public, but it has since gained many fans. Its integration with the desktop is perhaps the most exciting feature of this product. Other features we like are the sharing of folders and preservation of every revision of every file.

8. Seesmic: A number of Twitter clients were mentioned, like Hootsuite and TweetDeck. But one which has impressed us a lot in recent months has been Seesmic. In July we reported that Seesmic, previously only a desktop client, had released a web-based version and a new version of the Seesmic desktop. The web-based version of Seesmic recreates most of the features that are currently available in the desktop application. Our own Frederic Lardinois listed Seesmic Web as one of his 3 most exciting apps.

9. Wolfram|Alpha: Ever since Wolfram|Alpha’s admittedly much hyped launch in May, we’ve been tracking this innovative product closely. It’s a self-described “computational knowledge engine” and while it’s not quite the Google killer some predicted, it has many potential uses – which makes it an exciting app to follow for us.

10. Pubsubhubbub: With a name harder to say that ‘ReadWriteWeb,’ this new Google Code project has excited the web development community. It’s not a product, but a protocol. The project page describes it as a "simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom (and RSS)." In laymans terms, it delivers your RSS feeds to you much quicker – in near real time.

To understand the context of Pubsubhubbub and similar exciting initiatives more, read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s fine analysis of Distributed Social Networking.

There you have it, the top 10 most exciting web apps and services according to the ReadWriteWeb community! Let us know your further thoughts in the comments.

Here is the full list, a snapshot taken when the original post had 66 comments (sans links, but Google – or Bing – any app that catches your eye).

Twitter 25
Gmail 17
Google Reader 11
Google Wave 11
Facebook 6
Blip.fm 4
Dropbox 4
Hootsuite 4
Wolfram Alpha 4
Pubsubhubbub 3
Scribd 3
Seesmic 3
Spotify 3
Wordpress 3
Apture 2
Boxee 2
Delicious 2
Flickr 2
foursquare 2
getsatisfaction 2
Google 2
last.fm 2
PixelPipe 2
Posterous 2
Skype 2
TweetDeck 2
Xmarks 2
Appboy
Bespin
Bit.ly
Bloom
Brightkite
Caspio
chi.mp
Cliqset
Deezer
Digg
Dizzler
Dopplr
Edmodo
Evernote
Feedly
FriendFeed
Gmail chat
GMX Mail
Google Analytics
Google Analytics API
Google APIs
Google Docs
Google insight
Google Maps
Google Notebook
Google Voice
Hype Machine
Instant XRay
Instapaper
iWantMyName
JaJah
JobTitled
Jolicloud
Jott
justbought.it
Know Thy Congressman
kreeo
Lala
Layar
LinkedIn
metafilter
mint
MobileMe
My Name is E
Nanovor
Newsmap.jp
Pachube
Parade
Peoplebrowsr
PocketSmith
Ponoko
PopUrls
Prezi
Primal Fusion
Salesforce
Shapeways
SocialText
SoundCloud
Sweetcron
Tarpipe
TimeXchange.net
Tracer
Tumblr
tweetworks
Twitterfall
urtak
W3C QA Toolbox
XCODE
Youtube

Cat pic: Mr.Thomas

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iLike Also Had Offers From Facebook and Amazon

There’s lots of speculation out there on the yet-to-be-closed MySpace acquisition of iLike that we first reported on Monday.

Much of that speculation is factually incorrect, we’ve confirmed from a source close the the deal. iLike, which has been profitable for over a year, had multiple offers to be acquired.

Our source says that, in addition to MySpace’s offer, both Facebook and Amazon submitted bona fide written offers to buy the company. At least one other large company expressed interest to Allen & Company, iLike’s advisors to the deal.

Activision Blizzard and Microsoft have been incorrectly rumored to have been seriously interested in the company, however.

iLike ultimately chose MySpace based party on price, and partly on a fit with the buyer, sources say. Facebook was largely off the table due to building distrust between the companies.

Also, multiple sources tell us that the deal negotiations with MySpace have been moving along quickly and are now virtually complete. There was no last minute canceled iLike board meeting (in fact no board meeting was scheduled), and no hiccups over tax issues on the deal.

“People are literally making this drama up,” said one source.

It’s also clear that the relatively low valuation that iLike commanded in this sale was due less to their performance and more to uncertainty created by Facebook over their future on the Facebook Platform.

iLike is profitable and has 50+ million registered users. Unlike other music services they don’t have crushing streaming payments to make to labels because, well, they don’t stream music.

They are certainly now in a position to stand on their own as a company over the long term. Except that ongoing uncertainty over Facebook’s intentions to compete with them directly as well as regular changes to the rules around Facebook Platform mean they could get cut off at any time.

In other words, this is less about iLike’s financial and user growth and more about Facebook’s unwillingness to let Platform partners get too big. There continues to be no clear line as to where Facebook’s internal apps end and Platform begins.

We continue to expect the deal to be closed and announced shortly. And we eagerly await Facebook’s response to their main competitor, MySpace, suddenly owning (the de facto) Facebook Music.

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