SEATTLE, WA. (Top40 Charts/ iLike) - iLike, the Web's leading social music discovery service and the dominant music application on Facebook Platform, today announced an innovative new suite of services to help artists build viral fan communities. Leveraging iLike's 'Artist-Fan Graph,' a vast database of connections between consumers and their favorite artists, the new Artist Services Platform is intended to transform the way artists cultivate and communicate with their fanbases. Today's announcement signals iLike's transformation beyond music discovery to enabling artist-fan communication on iLike.com and Facebook.
Thanks to its popularity among Facebook users, iLike is now one of the fastest growing music services in the world, with 13 million users worldwide and three million more being added monthly. Among music applications built on Facebook Platform, iLike has a dominant first-place position, with over 20 times more daily users than the second-place contender, according to Facebook's public applications directory. As a result, iLike is rapidly being adopted by artists and record labels as their preferred vehicle for promoting music to Facebook users. The new features announced today include iCast�, a multimedia blogging tool including mobile video posting for artists, and a personalized news feed for fans to follow what's new among their favorite artists.
'We're giving artists the opportunity to communicate directly with their fans on Facebook and iLike.com, whether they're announcing concert dates or simply sharing a personal moment,' said Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike. 'Over the past few months we've accumulated a tremendous wealth of information about who likes what and now we're empowering artists to use this data to cultivate their own viral fan communities.'
Features of the iLike Artist Services Platform
iLike's new Artist Services Platform is free and available to all artists. To participate, artists simply sign up at www.iLike.com/forartists. New features include the following:
* One Dashboard to Manage Artist Pages on Multiple Sites: Artists and their representatives can now reach fans among both iLike.com and Facebook users through a single dashboard. Designed for use by music industry professionals, the iLike Artist Dashboard allows a manager to manage multiple artists via a single login, and allows multiple account holders (such as record label representatives, managers and so forth) to share access to a single artist.
* Easy Multimedia Blogging with iCast: Designed to encourage artist-fan communication, iLike's new iCast tool allows artists to easily post messages with text, photos, audio and video.
* Convenient Mobile Videocasting: iCast enables artists to post content directly from any mobile phone via email. Turning any cameraphone into an instant personal broadcasting system, artists can now communicate with fans from wherever they want to � capturing candid moments on video from the back of a tour bus, inside the recording studio, backstage at a sold-out show and so forth.
* Personalized Artist Activity Feed & Concert Alerts for Fans: Powerfully leveraging iLike's 'Artist-Fan Graph' of people's music tastes, the artist activity feed will inform fans when their favorite artists post iCast messages, upload songs or videos or announce new events. Fans on Facebook will also be alerted via stories inserted into their News Feed.
* Stats and Reports for Artists: The number of fans an artist has access to will now be made public on every artist page. Additionally, iLike will provide artists with more detailed stats about how their fanbase is interacting with their content. For example, iLike will report on the number of an artist's songs that have been added to user profiles.
For more information about the iLike Artist Services Platform, or to sign up as an artist, visit: www.iLike.com/forartists.
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