Brooklyn's Tunecore Teams With iLike to Help Indie Artists Sell Music

Speaking of MySpace Music and Facebook applications, Seattle's iLike, the "social music" service with a popular Facebook application, has partnered with Brooklyn-based TuneCore, a music distribution start-up, to help musicians promote and sell their music. 

iLike's free Facebook application lets users put a little sidebar on their page to play clips of music, display upcoming concerts they are attending and play a music trivia quiz. TuneCore helps artists distribute their work through online music stores including Rhapsody, Amazon MP3, and iTunes. Bands and musicians pay a flat fee, with prices varying based on the number of stores they want to get into and how much they want to sell (a single or a whole album). But once they pay the fee, they can keep 100 percent of the revenue. Not bad!

With the new partnership, artists can now earn royalties when their music is streamed not only on iLike.com but also on Facebook applications, hi5, Orkut, Bebo, iLike's third-party developer platform ( www.iLike.com/developer) and "other leading channels across the Web," according to the press release.

The new service perks will help out indie bands snubbed by MySpace Music, who partnered with major labels (plus one indie label, after a big backlash) for their new digital music distribution site.