By Michael Cohn

Social music discovery service iLike worked out a deal in 2004 with Apple to license the name of its music web site GarageBand.com to Apple for its GarageBand music software, much like the deal Apple worked out with Cisco Systems last month.

This week at the Digital Music Forum East conference in New York, the San Francisco-based company said it signed a deal with Ticketmaster to expand its service to concert event listings after Ticketmaster made a $13.3-million investment last December. iLike will not only allow users to find out each other’s music preferences, but they also will be able to get notifications of upcoming concerts featuring their favorite performers.

The GarageBand.com site has been around since 1999, allowing musicians to upload their tracks and share them, much like MySpace has been doing more recently. Last July GarageBand.com scored a $2.5-million investment led by Khosla Ventures and partner David Weiden.

Other investors in the round included Herbert Allen III of Allen & Company and Bob Pittman, a co-founder of MTV and former head of AOL. Mr. Allen and Mr. Pittman joined the advisory board, which also includes Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads, Beatles producer Sir George Martin, and David Goldberg, head of Yahoo Music.

The company started the iLike service four months ago as a way for users to share their music recommendations, as well as listen to and buy music, and changed its name to iLike. Since its launch, the site has already attracted 500,000 users, the company announced Wednesday.

CEO Ali Partovi talked to Red Herring about social music discovery and the deals with Apple and Ticketmaster. Edited excerpts of the interview follow:

Q: What is the relationship with Apple and GarageBand.com? Are you sharing the name with Apple now, as Cisco is doing with the iPhone name?

A: We’re licensing the name to them. But the GarageBand name is still very valuable. It’s analogous to Google and AdWords.

Q: How do you work with Apple?

A: We have playlist sharing with iTunes. You can discover music through friends’ playlists. We also now have support for Windows Media Player. Our approach is we don’t do all things for all people. Between 80 percent to 85 percent of people use iTunes and the iPod. We’ve chosen to focus on the iPod segment, but we also work with Windows Media Player. We don’t care what format you use: AAC, WMA, or MP3. It’s about discovering music and talent.

Q: How does the service work?

A: Let’s say you’ve got five or 10 friends on the service. You can see what they’ve been listening to recently and you can discover new music. If you want to buy the music, we link to iTunes and Amazon. We make a few cents from them. We also plan to put some resources into supporting Rhapsody, Winamp, and Yahoo Music, but it’s not a high priority.

Q: Do you plan to offer mobile phone support for your social music discovery service, like OxySystems and Avvenu are doing?

A: We’ve just been offering iLike on the computer, but we will look at what to do to take advantage of trends like SMS. You might be able to get an alert from Ticketmaster. Since our system knows what music you listen to the most, it can tell you when tickets go on sale for those groups.

Q: Have you been making much revenue yet?

A: The iLike service hasn’t made any revenue, but iLike Inc.’s GarageBand has been making money. iLike is really young, just four months old, so it’s barely out of the gate. We’re still building our core functionality. We’ll get a cut out of the transaction for concert tickets through Ticketmaster and we’ll also sell ads for concerts. We’ll send you a personalized message about which bands that you like are coming to town. If you have friends on the service who like the same bands, we can also tell you who you can go with.

Q: How does the GarageBand service work?

A: Musicians upload their music to GarageBand. The system effectively sifts through the music. Each person rates and reviews the music so it’s guaranteed to be listened to. By the time a song reaches the top of the chart, the song originally found its way into other users’ recommendations. We’ve created a cool funnel for the stuff to reach people. They’re guaranteed a fair shot. There’s a love of creativity out there. People just want other people to hear their songs. It’s a nice thing to help them pursue their dreams. People have been discovered on GarageBand. One band was in a Mountain Dew commercial and others have had their music used in movies.

Q: I understand iLike also works with MySpace. How does that work?

A: MySpace is the big gorilla. We add music discovery for MySpace. You can click through to someone’s iLike profile from their MySpace page and see the overlap between your music library and theirs.

Q: Are you doing this in conjunction with News Corp.? Is there a possibility of them or Apple acquiring you?