based on garageband.com’s success, i’m aprehensive. how do you raise 2.5 million after garageband.com?

I hadn’t heard of Artist Server before so I guess I will check it out, but GarageBand is certainly a very large community of musicians, if not the largest. Of course MySpace has more bands, but it also has dating, semi-porn, movies, comedians, etc, and it’s very difficult to navigate.

If iLike maintains a simple lightweight style and can deliver some of the capabilities of Last.FM but merging in all the music from GarageBand.com, it’s a service I will definitely want to use!

their lame redesign

Yeah – they should have made the site ‘skinable’ – it’s a bit heavy now.

And yes, GarageBand is by far much greater in size that ArtistServer. The bulk of the music on ArtistServer is ‘electronic’ as the site originally hosted electronic music only. And yes, they have much more traffic.

if you’re catering to unsigned artists, isn’t myspace the clear winner here?

Yes, a band should have a site on MySpace simply because of the ever growing numbers – but no, MySpace is not the best place for bands. If the site was about music, you’d see a lot features for music discovery and sharing – but they don’t even have genre listings of songs, nor charts, playlists, etc.

It does sound similar to LastFM. I agree LastFM is cool but I’d love to see somebody do a better job. With LastFM’s month-long outage last month (wtf!); their lame redecsign; and super-slow sight responsiveness, there’s a lotta room for somebody to do it better. you never know, lastfm could become the next friendster.

I will say that iLike looks like a FAR cleaner sight, and certainly a better brand, than GarageBand — and that stuff does make a difference.

I’ve followed GarageBand in the past. Its a cool solid service (and i’m sorry, but it’s way better known than ArtistServer… i have no idea about the feature sets, but if you look at the Rock category on each sight, looks like ArtistServer has 26 songs and GaragBAnd has 13,000).

But mainly i think, who cares — if you’re catering to unsigned artists, isn’t myspace the clear winner here? Who wants to be king of the also-rans? Not me! I think it’s extremely smart that GarageBand is changing the playing field and developing new services… they’re evolving and changing the game in a clever way, maybe they’ll be competing with LastFM instead of Myspace but that’s a fight they could win.

They should try it my way… no capital, no staff and lots of coffee!

I’ve been a competitor of GarageBand.com since 2001, and in the last year have surpassed them in terms of services offered to artists, and site functionality.

Both GarageBand.com and my site, http://www.ArtistServer.com were both featured in Time Magazine last November – listed as two of the top 20 Music sites on the Web.

Why they are planning to launch an alternate site is a bit odd though. I would think they’d want to help ensure that GarageBand.com has a future by evolving it’s services.

From the description on the “About Us” page, it sounds like they want to launch something more like Last.FM – which absolutely rocks as a service.

I on the otherhand am working to leverage my current site/service by building a new layer on top which would allow others to launch their own Social Media Networks. At this point in the game, we need to support the long tail through empowering it, not by building more clones.

Thanks for the news,
Gideon Marken