This is a tough time to sell things – houses, automobiles, music-related startups.  The open secret is that the Partovi brothers have been aggressively looking for an exit for quite some time, even at a depressed valuation.  The reasons vary depending on the source, though one problem is that iLike is so closely tied to Facebook, regardless of attempts to broaden the application towards other networks.  The rest was hard to monetize, though the company reportedly maintains a mildly profitable profile.

This is not the sort of exit that investors envision.  Sure, plenty of startups end more abruptly, at $0 to boot.  But the truly successful plays produce huge multiples on the initial investment.  And for venture capital funds, they also cover a lot of other losers.

In that light, iLike is just a lukewarm punt, and definitely not a moneymaker – especially given investment levels nearing $17 million. Perhaps a compromise in a market that has frozen out IPOs and outlandish M&A deals.

And the outlandish ways of the past have proven quite costly.  Last.fm offers the easiest example – CBS grabbed the company for $280 million, but has since experienced difficulty translating its music-focused audience into something powerful and moneymaking.

But isn’t that the real challenge, to create groundbreaking, Google-like monetization moments?  Perhaps the Partovis are just too rich, too impatient, too Silicon Valley.  Entrepreneurs like Tim Westergren are a different breed – more steadfast, and not rich – at least not yet.  They’ll slog it out for years, fighting the scrappy fight, even while their babies languish on life support.  The vision is worth dying for, and in the case of Westergren, worth the blood, sweat, and maxed-out credit cards.

And who knows what else.  But these stick-it-out stories aren’t always as interesting as Westergren’s – often, like Allan Klepfisz at Qtrax or Joe Mohen at Spiralfrog, they are simply hard to watch, and painfully inflexible in such a quick-moving environment.

But the post-acquisition iLike may also live a painful existence.  This is not a MySpace Music acquisition – instead, Owen Van Natta described a separate integration process.  An already confusing music footprint gets bigger and more complicated, though Van Natta wants to broaden the iLike profile beyond music and into other forms of media.  The rest of the vision is mostly unclear, though plenty are having problems understanding this deal.  Is MySpace just too layered, too kludgy, too complicated to make this work?

Meanwhile, Facebook looms large.  Under its mighty thumb lies the iLike application insect, one that can be limited, redirected, or even crushed.  Suddenly, the 2.0 interplay is getting exponentially more complicated – MySpace wants networked reach, even through its biggest rival.  Facebook, in the meantime, has some interesting music-related choices ahead, ones that now have even deeper repercussions for MySpace.

Paul Resnikoff, Publisher.