Thumbplay News

NEW YORK, December 6, 2007 – Thumbplay® (www.thumbplay.com), the largest and fastest growing mobile entertainment content destination in the U.S. (Nielsen Mobile, Q3 2007), today announced an exclusive partnership with iLike (www.ilike.com), the Web’s leading social music discovery service. Thumbplay’s ringtones are now contextually featured throughout iLike.com and the iLike application on Facebook® Platform (www.facebook.com), allowing users to discover, purchase and download ringtones to more than 2,000 supported and compatible mobile phones. iLike plans to extend its contextual integration of Thumbplay’s catalog into additional social platforms that have announced support for Google OpenSocial, such as Bebo, hi5, MySpace, orkut and Ning.

Across iLike, “Get ringtone” links to Thumbplay are now featured alongside links to iTunes® in every relevant song module on artist, album and song pages, as well as users’ shared playlists. Similar links are incorporated into the iLike Challenge, so users can discover and purchase ringtones of songs played in the game.

With its soaring popularity among Facebook users, iLike is the Web’s fastest-growing music service, with more than 15 million users worldwide and adding millions more each month. Additional sites that have committed to supporting OpenSocial represent an audience of 200 million users globally that may be exposed to Thumbplay’s mobile entertainment content as iLike expands into these new platforms.

“With the addition of Thumbplay ringtone links, iLike has just expanded our music discovery features to include also a fantastic ringtone-discovery experience,” said Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike. “As the mobile entertainment content industry leader, Thumbplay delivers the broadest and deepest catalog of content to our 15 million registered users, so they can now take their music with them as ringtones regardless of which carrier or phone they’re using.“

“It is clear from iLike’s rapid growth that consumers love discovering and sharing new music with their friends,” said Are Traasdahl, Thumbplay’s CEO and founder. “By pairing with iLike, we’re enabling their consumers to extend the social music experience to their mobile phones.”

With more than 75,000 pieces of mobile entertainment content under license, including ringtones, wallpapers, games, videos, voice tones and text-based services, Thumbplay has built a strong consumer following and gained broad recognition as a leader in the direct-to-consumer mobile content space.

About iLike, inc
iLike is the Web's leading social music discovery service and the dominant music application on the Facebook Platform. With more than 15 million registered users, iLike helps people share music recommendations, playlists, and personalized concert alerts. The iLike Sidebar for iTunes and Windows Media Player suggests new music, creates automatic playlists, and connects people through music. iLike offers musicians and labels a Universal Artist Dashboard from which to reach fans and manage their presence across multiple channels: Facebook, iLike.com, Ask.com, iLike Sidebar plugins for iTunes and Windows Media Player (and soon, through adoption of Google OpenSocial, also Myspace, Bebo, orkut, hi5, Ning, and other leading social networking sites). By leveraging iLike's "artist-fan graph," a vast database of connections between consumers and their favorite artists, iLike helps artists reach their fans and cultivate the viral spread of their music. iLike, inc also runs indie music site GarageBand.com.

About Thumbplay
Thumbplay, Inc. is defining the mobile entertainment experience for U.S. consumers. As the largest and fastest growing mobile entertainment content destination, Thumbplay gives consumers access to the broadest and deepest catalog in the industry, spanning audio, video and gaming content from the leading music labels and artists, game publishers and media companies. Its innovative delivery and marketing platform makes it easy for users to discover, manage, store and share mobile content online and on their wireless devices.

Headquartered in New York City, Thumbplay was founded in September 2004 by Are Traasdahl and Evan Schwartz. It is backed by Bain Capital Ventures, SoftBank Capital, i-Hatch Ventures, Redwood Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Meritech. More information can be found at www.thumbplay.com.

Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc. iTunes® is a registered trademark of Apple Inc. Windows Media Player® is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corp. Google, orkut, and OpenSocial are trademarks of Google Inc.

Labels: press-release

posted by Thumbplay at 4:48 PM