Sun Founder funds new social music discovery service




According to GigaOm, Sun founder Vinod Khosla is backing GarageBand.com as they prepare to launch iLike, a social music discovery service.  iLike is still in  stealth mode with nothing released yet ... here's what they say about themselves:

We're working on a service to help you organize your music, share your music tastes, and discover new music through your friends. We don't want to say too much about it on the site, not because we're secretive, but because we don't want to build up expectations. We prefer to under-promise and over-deliver, so let's just say we plan on shipping new stuff frequently, and you can decide if you like it or not.

It will be interesting to see how they can distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack of social music services.  It seems that between sites like MySpace,  Last.fm, MusicStrands, MusicMobs  and Yahoo, the social music space keeps growing and growing.  Is there room for all of these services?

Posted on: Jul 27, 2006

Posted by: plamere

Category: music

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Comments:

"Is there room for all of these services?" In my opinon=NO, from my perspective from germany I could add about 5-7 further activities in this area coming from telcos, ISPs, research institutes, opensource folks .. we just finished a lightweight mobile version which is under test ... I dont know where this well end up ...

Posted by Stephan Baumann on July 28, 2006 at 06:04 AM EDT #

OK, I'm willing to argue the opposite corner: YES, there could be room for all these services. I've just finished Chris Anderson's Long Tail book, and one of the frustrating things for me in his recommenders/filters chapter was what seemed like an implicit assumption that you just need a few recommenders. Why shouldn't there be a long tail for these social music recommenders as well. There will be 'hits' like MySpace, but what's to stop the growth of a series of niche services that differentiate themselves on different criteria (e.g. how social they are, what areas of music they specialise in)?

I guess it partly depends on whether you believe that the 'hit' services can offer good enough personalisation to cater for niche needs. I'm sceptical (forgive the UK spelling ;-)

Admittedly one problem with my argument is that it may be difficult to aggregate a long tail of recommender services. And without the aggregation, can the services in the long tail remain viable?

Posted by David Jennings on July 28, 2006 at 08:42 AM EDT #

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