Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that ticketing behemoth Ticketmaster has agreed to buy a 25% stake in the music-recommendation service iLike.com. iLike, as its name suggests, is an iTunes plugin that tracks users’ listening data and turns that information into music recommendations; it’s linked to the emerging-music community GarageBand.com, which counts Drowning Pool among its success stories.

The iLike investment is a curious one for Ticketmaster, who claim to the WSJ that the alliance will help the company “build longer-lasting connections with users besides ticket purchases, and help consumers learn about new artists whose concerts they might want to attend.” We’ve had the weighty plugin installed for the past few weeks, and, like most of the music-discovery sites that have popped up lately, the results have been middling; iLike’s recommendations have either been useless (if you like T.I., you’ll love Ludacris!) or nonexistent (particularly with “new artists” who aren’t affiliated with GarageBand). Couple that with its slow load times (we can almost hear our iTunes gasping for breath every time the iLike window refreshes), and we can’t really see how–without some serious infrastructure tweaking on both the tech and music-discovery sides–Ticketmaster’s latest pet project will be adopted by its customer base.

Ticketmaster Invests in Music Site [WSJ]