iJigg, Digg for music, growing despite competition

August 29, 2007 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

picture-6.png iJigg is what it sounds like: A social media ranking site like Digg, but for finding great music.

The site’s front page features the most popular tracks and newest tracks from other users, that you can listen to with a click of a button without having to sign up.

If you register, you can vote on your favorite tracks, upload your own music files — currently only mp3 files — comment on what you’re listening to, edit your profile and friend other users. Those who upload tracks can choose to let others download them for free.

The site has been growing fast — despite millions of people happily using a near-infinite number of other sites that offer ways to find and share music, such as Pandora and Last.fm. A closer competitor is newly-launched Contra Stream, which also features tracks voted up by users.

iJigg has had more than 12 million pageviews so far this month, and more than 250,000 tracks are being listened to on an average day, it claims. More than 130,000 people have registered with around 1,700 more joining per day. Not bad, considering the site launched this past January and was still very small when we first talked to the company in April.

To guard against the illegal sharing of music, the site offers the usual DMCA-compliance takedown request information; the company tells us it hasn’t had any copyright-related problems.

iJigg started in Chapel Hill, North Carolina but is moving to Silicon Valley. It took funding from Y Combinator in April and is in the process of raising an angel round.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • gTech
    80% of iJiggs traffic comes from Thailand according to alexa.

    http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_detai...

    Somewhat of an odd demographic.. maybe its because the music is free to listen to?
  • Alexa is not reliable enough to be useful for something like that. If it were the case, wouldn't we see more Thai artists at the top of the charts?
  • gTech
    I'd agree with you if the stat wasn't 80%. Even if its 10-20% off its still a huge market share. Thailand is known for its self-censorship on media and just today lifted their ban on youtube.

    I'd bet money that has something to do with the success of ijigg.