Myspace officially pulled the plug on the social music service iLike.com today, putting an end to what once was hailed as the most popular social music service (hat tip to hypebot). iLike was one of the first startups to offer a combination of free music streaming and social networking, which helped it to gather some 55 million registered users by the time it was bought by Myspace in 2009. However, its revenue never added up, and now it is joining Napster, Lala, Imeem and others in digital media heaven, proving once again that making money with music online is really, really hard.

iLike launched as a standalone service in 2006, initially focusing on a combination of a web service and an iTunes sidebar. In early 2007, it debuted as one of the first music apps on Facebook, and soon attracted millions of new users per month. What made iLike so successful? The service not only offered free streaming, but also tracked users’ listening habits and served up social recommendations. The service also attracted bands and labels, who used it to create buzz for new releases.

At one point, it had 10 million monthly active users on Facebook alone, generating some 1.5 billion page views. The company got $ 17 million in funding, including a $ 13 million investment by Ticketmaster, and briefly seemed like the next big thing in online music.

However, iLike struggled not only with licenses for its music, but also with its reliance on Facebook as a platform as well as its overall business model: Turns out, serving up free, ad-supported music is really, really hard, and concert ticket referral fees never really made a big difference either. iLike eventually sold to Myspace for a reported $ 20 million in 2009, and has since been living alongside the more popular Myspace Music service, slowly withering to obscurity.

Of course, iLike isn’t alone with this fate: Imeem, which offered a very similar service, was also absorbed and eventually shuttered by Myspace. Napster’s assets were sold to Rhapsody last fall, and the service eventually shut down in December. And Apple shuttered Lala’s streaming service after it bought the company in late 2009 to power its cloud platform.

All of this should be a warning to music services like Rdio and MOG, which currently are trying to grow their user base with free music. Insiders have long predicted that even Spotify, arguably the biggest of this new crop of streaming services, can’t be profitable with the licenses offered by the labels. And if there’s any lesson to be learned from iLike, it’s that a large user base alone isn’t enough to succeed.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Hitchster.

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Whenever newspaper executives get together to bemoan the fate of their industry, someone inevitably brings up the so-called “original sin” of the online news business — namely, a failure to charge for content when the web was new. One of the latest manifestations of this idea appears in an upcoming e-book called “Why American Newspapers Gave Away the Future,” from former Wall Street Journal executive Richard Tofel, which looks at the failure of newspapers on a number of levels. But this theory that newspapers could have somehow won a war against the internet if they had just charged users for content misses the point — the point being that the media game is now being played according to different rules.

Although Tofel’s book isn’t available yet (it will be available for download on Wednesday), media blogger Jim Romenesko has some excerpts from the text, and among other things the author appears to be suggesting that newspapers could have saved themselves from certain doom if they had only continued the practice of charging for their content when the internet came along. As Tofel puts it:

How, as a visitor from another planet might ask, did a large industry that had successfully charged customers for its product for more than a century come to decide to give that product away and thus threaten its very existence?

Putting content online for free was not a sin, nor was it original

Tofel notes in the comments section of Romenesko’s blog that his view of the evolution of newspapers and the web is more nuanced than just believing that they could have saved themselves by putting up paywalls, but this still sounds like the old “original sin” argument that has been rattling around in media circles for years now. One of the first to put it into words was former newspaper editor Alan “Newsosaur” Mutter, who said “the Original Sin among most publishers was permitting their content be consumed for free on the web,” and suggested that recovering from this sin was going to be just as hard as recovering from the sins committed in the Garden of Eden.

Another outlet that took up the idea of an “original sin” was the American Journalism Review, which wrote about how the failure to charge for content when newspaper websites first appeared was a decision that doomed the industry to poverty and irrelevance. As one journalism professor quoted in the piece put it:

When newspaper publishers decided they couldn’t charge for content, Reisner says, they started giving it away, and wound up “being sluts who’d put out for any old Google that came their way.”

This idea is part of the same conceptual framework as News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s continued insistence that Google and other online news aggregators are “stealing” content from newspapers, and that they should be forced to pay for it. Both viewpoints are an attempt to reimpose the traditional structure of the media business — in which newspapers had something close to a monopoly on the news, and also controlled one of the primary platforms through which it was distributed.

Neither of those things are the case now, as Om has described in his posts about the “democratization of distribution,” and as I’ve pointed out in posts about the disruption of the business of journalism, and what the new world of media looks like. News sources can “go direct” and publish their own content, as can anyone with a blog or a Twitter account, and new media entities can be born from virtually nothing — as the rise of The Huffington Post indicates. News now comes to readers in hundreds of different ways, not just through one or two platforms, and in the long run that is fundamentally a good thing.

Charging for content would only have delayed the inevitable

It’s also worth noting, as some did when the “original sin” idea first appeared, that newspapers have never made the bulk of their income from readers who pay for content. Subscription prices and newsstand sales have always been subservient to advertising, and in some cases giving content away can be a totally viable business model, provided advertisers are willing to pay enough for the attention of those readers. That value proposition worked in print, but it fails online — and that failure would not have been any less painful if newspapers had charged for access.

If anything, the original sin of newspapers was a failure to appreciate all the ways in which the internet was going to fundamentally change the nature of their business, and a failure to try and adapt to those changes quickly enough. In some ways, trying to perpetuate the old model of charging for their content — in the case of classified ads, for example — delayed that process of adaptation, and thereby allowed someone without preconceived notions about the marketplace (namely, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark) to win without even trying to disrupt the media industry.

Would any of this have changed if newspapers had simply charged for their content? No. Paywall fans like to point to the Wall Street Journal and The Economist as examples of how media outlets can charge users and remain financially healthy — or even to the New York Times, which has convinced about 325,000 people to subscribe and is estimated to be making about $ 80 million or so from the venture. But those examples ignore the fact that not every newspaper can be the WSJ or the NYT or The Economist, and they also ignore the fact that the revenue picture at New York Times is far from rosy, despite its paywall.

Success in the news business isn’t going to come from staring longingly into the past and thinking about some mythical Golden Age in which newspapers all charged for their content and the internet was not a disruptive force. The disruption has happened, and the business has been irrevocably altered — if they want to survive, newspapers should spend more time thinking about how to adapt, and less time dreaming about how much better life would be if only they had put up a paywall 10 years ago.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Gabriel S. Delgado and

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Super Bowl weekend is upon us, and this year, the big game is going to be streamed live online for the very first time. Who wants to see the game between the Giants and the Patriots on a tiny laptop screen, you might ask? Cord cutters and other folks without cable or even a TV set for one, but the live stream also comes with some extra perks that the TV broadcast won’t offer: Viewers will be able to select from different camera angles, pause the game and other fun stuff.

Are you one of those people who just watch the game to catch a glimpse of the ads? No worries, you’ll find all of those online as well. There is also a bunch of second-screen action going on this year to deliver tweets and other extra content to your cell phone or iPad while you watch TV. And speaking of mobile: You’ll even be able to watch the entire game on your handset. You know, in case that laptop screen is to big, or you happen to be away from both Internet and TV.

Here’s our growing list of online resources for Super Bowl XLVI on Sunday 02/05:

• NBCSports.com will show the entire game online starting with some of the preagme action at 2pm ET (11am PT). The kickoff is at 6:30pm ET (3:30pm PT), and the game will feature HD-quality streams from multiple camera angles, DVR-like functionality to pause and replay the action and a number of social features.
• Verizon subscribers will also be able to stream the game on their phones through the NFL Mobile app, which is available for both iOS and Android. More info on the app here.
• Twitter has aggregated all the relevant accounts and hash tags to follow in this blog post.
• Hulu has once again aggregated Super Bowl ads in its Adzone.
• YouTube has Super Bowl ads, recipes and more in its AdBlitz channel.
• At least five of the ads shown during the game will use Shazam to offer free downloads, sweepstakes and other stuff meant to entice you to join the second-screen action. More about this on Shazam’s blog.

We’re gonna update this list with additional links in the coming days. Stay tuned!

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