Over the past couple of days, we've noticed an upsurge in press for
iLike, the music-networking site that's apparently gone from 1 million users to 6 million users over the past month, thanks to its being included in the initial suite of applications offered by the social-networking site Facebook, which is like MySpace except with less blinking backgrounds and more functionality. iLike's massive userbase puts the service well ahead of Last.fm and other sites of its ilk. But we, well, didn't like it much; we found it
somewhat cumbersome when we tried it out a few months back, and we've noticed that a good chunk of our Facebook friends who have added the application to their profiles have either left it blank or dropped it altogether after finding out just how much strain it put on their computers. So we're curious: Do you use iLike? Did you try it and drop it? And are we still counted as an iLike user, even though we uninstalled its iTunes plugin about two days after we wrote our initial item on the service?
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Idolator
R.E.M.'s Accelerate will stream on iLike, the iTunes-tracker-slash-Facebook-app that I uninstalled long ago, beginning on March 24. That's a whole week before the album's April 1 release date—and a week or so after it will likely leak out from Warner Music Group's double-locked safe for really big, important albums. [
Continuing its trend of pulling its music from online services that won't pay it heed—or at least a nice chunk of money—Universal Music Group has yanked 30-second sound samples of its labels' songs from iLike, the music-sharing site that's quite popular with the Facebook set. According to Silicon Alley Insider, the dispute stems from a lapsed agreement between UMG and the sound-sample middleman Muze, which supplied iLike with UMG's streams. So now iLike and Universal are trying to hammer out some sort of deal that will restore the label's audio to the service, a deal which, if precedent is any indication, will likely involve iLike cutting some sort of punishing check to Doug Morris and his merry band of shmoos. All that, just so some sophomore at UW-Whitewater can keep introducing himself to prospective conquests with "In Da Club."
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