Meet the People Who Can Save Rock & Roll

Ali and Hadi Partovi
Founders of iLike.com

The Big Idea:
Founded iLike, the top music application on Facebook, creating an interconnected universe of 30 million fans.

Why It Matters:
iLike elegantly connects the world of social networking and music fandom and encourages those 140 million Facebook-ers to sample new acts and make playlists and recommendations plus buy more than $15 million worth of MP3 downloads, merch and concert tickets (Ticketmaster owns 25 percent of the company). “We know who people's friends are and what their tastes are," Hadi Partovi says. “If you find a concert you want to go to, our user interface already knows where you live and whether that artist is playing near you."

How They Did It:
The Iranian-born, Harvard-educated twins first worked together on Garageband.com, a social-networking site that predated MySpace, but never caught on. “You could have a band at the top of the Garageband site, but still nobody would hear it," Ali Partovi says. “I felt it was necessary to work with some other media channel that had a consumer audience." Within weeks of debuting, the iLike application on Facebook gathered millions of users.

What's Next:
Like MySpace, iLike is working aggressively with the record industry to market music online without alienating fans from buying it. And attitudes at major labels about free Internet music are changing slowly. “The major labels are trying out a lot of things now that they may not have been trying out a few years ago," Ali Partovi says, noting that albums from R.E.M., Thievery Corporation and Nine Inch Nails have premiered on iLike. “I'm excited about is this period because we're in this experiment. There are so many models being tried out, and one of them is bound to be better than the old model which, I think you'll agree, is broken."