How do you calculate "People like me?"

The iLike system uses the data we collect about your music tastes in order to find other people with similar music tastes. The more we know about you, the better we can be at finding other users with similar tastes. To get better recommendations, you can either find and rate artists (for example, take our easy quiz to rate artists), or download the iLike Sidebar for iTunes and listen to more music in iTunes or on your iPod.

How does it actually work? Well, we can't reveal all of our secret sauce. (but you can read more about the nuclear physicist who helped us develop our algorithms)

However, one thing you should know is that when you FIRST sign up, we do a very quick job of finding similar people. We simply looks at your top few most-played artists (or artists you iLike) and we randomly pick other users who are big fans of those artists. But after a few days of using the service, we will compare ALL of your music listening and find users who are truly the best match to your music tastes.

One thing that makes our algorithm particularly unique is we don't only look for people who listen to the exact same artists as you, but for people who listen to the same or similar artists. So if you listen to a ton of John Mayer and U2, and somebody else listens to a ton of Dave Matthews and Coldplay, we will know that you are musically compatible even though you don't listen to the exact same songs.

We will improve this over time to help you do much more in-depth searches, including searching for people with similar music who live nearby to you. :-)

Last update: 2008-03-24 00:16:33