This week I’ve been checking out the music recommendation and sharing service iLike beta by the folks behind Garageband. If you use iTunes then iLike will analyze your iTunes song database and recommend free songs from Garageband you can download as well as recommend other similar songs you might like. This is similar to services like last.fm formerly known as audioscrobbler or Launchcast that was reviewed last Halloween. You can optionally download from iLike a free sidebar utility for iTunes (Mac and Windows versions) that will show related music to songs as they are played, show what your friends are listening to and provide a quick link to your profile. You can listen to a short sample of some songs you don’t own but a few seconds of a song is rarely enough to know for sure if it’s good.

Don’t count on it
One iLike negative is the listened to song numbers. This wouldn’t be a big deal if on the artist pages it didn’t show the users and the bogus numbers next to other iLike usernames. What would be realistic played song numbers?

Let’s assume a three minute average per song for an artist and use the following math:

3 minutes = 20 songs per hour
20 songs per hour x 24 hours = 480 songs MAX per day
480 songs per day x 365 days = 175,200 song plays per year
175,200 song plays per year x 20 years = 3,504,000 plays

This means over the course of 100 years, the most a person could listen to a single artist is 17,520,000 assuming a three minute minimum per song and yet there are people who have in the hundreds of millions per song like Andy with Michael McDonald (pictured)? Impossible.

They should put a minimum three minute per song play into the counting algorithm or they are open to widespread song play spamming by users. The most I’ve listened to any artist’s music is around 350 times. It would be realistic to see people in the thousands and maybe even tens of thousands if the person only listened 24/7 to one artist, but millions … billions ? No way.

Mass invitation system could be annoying to friends
Earlier today I invited my friend Francisco to the system and he pointed out that by selecting one of the four mail programs and providing his login it preloaded the invite list with his entire address book.

I wouldn’t recommend sending mass invites like this. Mass unsolicited anything is a bad idea these days. It’s the fast track to getting removed from address books.

iLike women, where are you?
I noticed that most of the people signed up for iLike so far were men — at least by the profile pictures. I know women love music, so I’m curious how this will change the recommendations by other users once more women get signed up. Right now my twins page is heavily male-centric. Then again, maybe my appetite for 80s rock might be more he-friendly than she-friendly.

Not as much serendipity
As mentioned at the start of this post there are a number of similar music recommendation services and one which I’ve reviewed positively in the past is Pandora. The main difference between services like iLike and last.fm compared to Launchcast and Pandora is playing music you own versus music you don’t own. You can rate songs played thumbs up or down so these systems can build custom playlists for what they think you might like. Brady points out that last.fm does have a radio feature that will play music based on what’s in your playlist but I haven’t checked that out yet.

Pandora will let you build up to 100 custom music stations based on your ratings. This can lead to more serendipitous type music listening experience than using iLike especially if you have a smaller music collection. We have a little over 1,100 songs and not all of our CDs have been ripped to MP3. The Pandora experience is almost like programmable radio, only you can’t specify exactly what songs play when.. The Garageband free tracks feature in iLike will expose you to more indie music that can be immediately downloaded, so you could build your music collection with iLike. All the music services offer convenient links to buy music.

What music mood are you into?
With all the music options available, I’ve organized based on nine different moods below:

1. music you may not or don’t own but enjoy (through rating songs played) - Pandora, Launchcast
2. music you already own and playlists you’ve created - iLike iTunes, last.fm
3. music you may not or don’t own or may not be familiar with, played randomly - Pandora, terrestrial radio or satellite radio
4. commercial free music you may not or don’t own or may not be familiar with, played randomly - Pandora, satellite radio
5. explore free music to download legally from indie artists that are similar to your tastes - Garageband, iLike iTunes
6. share with others what you’re currently listening to on a webpage, Myspace, etc - iLike iTunes, last.fm
7. immediately skip songs playing you don’t like to next track - iLike iTunes, last.fm, Pandora (limited times per hour if you aren’t a paid subscriber)
8. find others with similar music tastes - iLike iTunes, last.fm
9. listen in car without internet - terrestrial radio, satellite radio (with receiver), various portable devices

As you’ll see, iLike can be used in 5 of the 9 music moods above. It’s weakest when you want to explore music you don’t already own — but tries to make up for that with the Garageband free tracks recommendations — or when you are without the computer and internet, although if you listen with an iPod your song counts will be synched up with iTunes and thus will be reflected in the iLike played counts eventually.

Techcrunch sort of dismissed iLike in its overview which brought the iLike and Garageband CEO Ali Partovi out swinging. Ali is very passionate about the music which is refreshing to see from a CEO of a music-oriented service. Features aside, exploring and sharing great music is what it’s all about.

If you use iTunes on Windows or Mac, iLike is worth checking out. The ability to just play iTunes as you normally would and report back the music to iLike makes it something you don’t have to interact with that much. I realize it’s beta and early but iLike really needs more users to make the recommendation features more real world useful. CEO Partovi points out that the Garageband userbase is huge, so hopefully a bunch of them will download and start using iLike. Will be interesting to see what this service is like in a year or two as last.fm has a two year headstart. Matt Marshall pointed out back in July that iLike was very similar to Apple’s iLife. I wonder how the sometimes hypersensitive Apple will feel about that?

I’m keeping iLike installed for awhile. Curious what readers think if/when you give iLike a try.

Update 10/28/2006 7:25am PST: A new version of iLike has fixed the iTunes song counts. No more people with millions of listens.

• Free ad-supported version of Pandora available
• Listen to Napster streaming songs up to five times for free
• Diary of a legal music downloader: My new AAA buying strategy
• More legal online music services info including prerelease review of new Napster
• Apple releases iTunes for Windows
• How to find related music artists with Music Artist Cloud