Contrary to what you said, the iLike fan counts DON’T include people who merely listened passively to an artist in iTunes. The numbers we
gave VentureBeat only counted people who have *explicitly* added artists on their iLike/Facebook profiles. So the comparison is much more relevant than you might think.

It’s a great idea to also include iTunes listeners in some way as “passive fans,” and we hope to incorporate that in the future. That will certainly boost our numbers!

It will never be a perfect apples-to-apples comparison. For one thing, iLike does not have 10 duplicate profiles for the same artist. On Myspace the process of finding and be-friending your favorite artists is a bit cumbersome, whereas on iLike it’s very streamlined… so perhaps those who do it on Myspace are more “devoted” fans? On the other hand iLike & Facebook do not seem to have “fake” people inflating the numbers.

We’ve only just begun looking at these numbers, and we don’t wanna get too excited yet. After all, Eric’s post was only based on a sample size of 11. iLike on Facebook is still only a few months old, and we still have a lot to learn.

regards,
Ali Partovi
CEO, iLike

For myspace, I need to search for my favorite artist, add them as a friend, and then have that confirmed.

ilike? I merely have to listen to the artist in itunes and it shows up in my list.

The engagement with MySpace is more active, I am specifically showing the world who my favorite artists are, and hopefully getting myself listed on the artist page as well.

The ilike engagement is more passive.

It could be that I’m not using the iLike app. the way most users are, but from what I see, it’s more like last.fm (which also has a small presence on facebook) then like myspace.