Is There An iLike Effect?
The #1 and #2 ranked albums on the iTunes album chart this week were Keith Urban's "Defying Gravity" and "Gavin Degraw's "Free". These two releases have little in common except that both of were debuted exclusively on iLike in advance of their 3/31 release dates.
The marketing campaigns for these releases were multifaceted; so it is difficult to measure the effect of a single placement. It is also true that both Urban and Degraw have large fan bases. But a look at their recent successes with advance debuts suggests that either iLike has been lucky enough to align itself only with winners or that this music discovery and social networking site can really help launch new releases.
Previous iLike exclusives that debuted high on the iTunes chart include: REM (#1), Lady Antebellum (#3), Ryan Adams (#1) and Jason Mraz (#3). iLike is also the top driver of sales to Ticketmaster and one of the top drivers of sales to iTunes overall. Naturally iLike CEO Ali Partovi agrees, "“From legendary bands like R.E.M. to emerging acts like Lady Antebellum, we've been honored that every artist we've worked with has been of such high caliber that they've debuted at or near the top of the iTunes Albums chart, without exception.”
I work with Gavin DeGraw’s management team. We are very excited about the iLike promotion and feel that it definitely helped in pushing sales for the albums. I haven’t seen exact statistics yet, but from what I’ve been told, the iLike streaming was very successful and a lot of people were listening to the album on that site.
An indicator? Sure. A simultaneous result? Probably. The cause? I don’t think so (yet). Not enough people pay attention to iLike, including artists and labels, for this to work.
iLike does not come up in industry or fan-level conversation right now. The iLike.com web site is not a destination with everything else vying for short attention spans. The iLike app is off in the corners, or on sub-tabs of people’s social networking profiles and still doesn’t have a clear focus on what it’s supposed to do besides maybe show a fan’s favorite music if it’s already in there (which is not always the case), and maybe make iLike some money if people click on an iTunes affiliate link which might lead to the product but often doesn’t. They can show traffic metrics all they want, but I’d wager it was incidental page loads without real eyeballs on them.
I’m not trying to be down on them, because I like (iLike) what they are trying to do. But if Facebook decides to handle music on their own at some point, iLike could be toast.
Gavin DeGraw’s “Free” surely is more pleasant than his other album from last year, but leaving off the 10th track, the closer of the album and making it an iTunes exclusive, thereby making all other released versions incomplete at the tiny length of 9 tracks only? What were they thinking?
It’s no wonder that it charts high on iTunes when all other versions are incomplete, but doing that comes at a price. I’m not buying crappy sounding 128k files, and I’m not buying chopped up albums.
iam