What services does iLike offer to recording artists?
Ty Cohen
As musicians, earning spare cash from our music is a high priority. One way to increase your playback and your CD sales is using services like iLike to promote your music. To understand how these services can help you as a musician, it helps to understand exactly what they do and what services they offer to the recording artists who use them.
iLike is an online media service where visitors to the site can download and share their music with other users. Owned by MySpace, the iLike site is classified as a social networking service but it has features that are different from the average social networking site. With an average of 150,000 visitors every day and over 15 million regular users, the iLike service offers a good chance that your band can find several new fans.
iLike makes it easy for users to find music, pictures and videos from their favorite musicians, whether they are independent artists or big names in the music industry, via their sidebar, Twitter integration and their Facebook app.
For musicians, iLike offers the ability to publish your audio recordings, video of your performances, pictures from your shows and other content that your new fans and old followers will be able to use to both find you and track you across the iLike site and into Facebook.
Speaking of Facebook, artist can manage their bands Facebook Fan Page from the iLike site using their own Artist Dashboard, a kind of control panel, where you can control everything about your iLike profile and your Facebook Fan Page from a central area.
Recording artists who make use of the Twitter integration of iLike can send tweets to their Twitter followers with links to their music, videos, and other content with the iLike + Twitter service. Twitter has become one of the most popular real time communication methods so this feature is a great way to announce new releases and upcoming concerts or band news as it happens. Imagine the potential here... Perhaps a surprise concert announced to your Twitter followers?
A new feature being offered to artists on the iLike service is the ability to build and manage personalized iPhone applications to promote your band and it's music. With the potential of this feature, you could create an app that sends reminders to purchase concert tickets or to remind fans when the latest CD will be released?
One of the important features of iLike is the ability to get detailed statistics and information about who is listening to your music. Why is this important? When you know who your fans are, you can cater to what they want and need. If your fans are under the age of 21, why would you hold your concerts in a bar where most of them couldn't get in the door? If your fans are twenty something's who are trying to pay the bills and raise new families, you are probably not going to be able to charge high ticket prices and still get the crowd you could see if you were in their budget. Knowing the demographic of your fans, thanks to the iLike service, helps you adjust your offerings to meet your fans needs and wants.
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