During the keynote address at f8, Facebook’s developers conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the much rumoured app integration we’ve been hearing a bit about the last few month, including some deep integration with a number of music applications.
Spotify stole the stage with founder Daniel Ek speaking at the conference, but a large number of other launch partners were announced such as Rhapsody, Soundcloud, Earbits, Vevo, Slacker Radio, Songza and more.
Calling the new service the ‘soundtrack to your social life’, Daneil Ek later wrote on Spotify.com “You’ll now start seeing new music posts and play buttons all over your newsfeeds. Hit a play button and the music starts. Right there. Spotify fires up to give you a new soundtrack to your social life. Check out your new Music Dashboard and your real-time ticker to discover the music that’s trending with your friends.’
The new service is built on Facebook’s Opengraph platform, and is not limited to music with partnerships with Hulu, Netflix, and a range of other media services announced. A new range of buttons to compliment the ubiquitous ‘like’ button will also be introduced such as ‘read’, ‘listen’, ‘watch’. No doubt we’ll start seeing many of these buttons appear throughout the internet shortly.
So is this new service really something new, and could it present a very real and serious threat to iTunes’s dominance of digital music? We believe yes. Whilst this service stops short of actually building a music store within Facebook it does set the scene for deeper integration such as that in the future.
What Facebook are trying to achieve is a change in listening patterns, and the big winners are those with the bigger budgets. No doubt services like Soundcloud and Spotify will benefit greatly from this deeper intergration, but who are the immediate losers?
Small music blogs are presented with the very real and present danger of becoming lost amongst noise from the bigger players. And this could present a backwards step rather than a step forward. Music blogs act as a very effective filter, and offer a critical eye that helps us sort the cheese from the chaf in an music environment where to begin with all music is created equal.
But no doubt the biggest losers in this are services like The Hype Machine and Last.fm. Last.fm will be especially hurt as this service mimics and improves upon the existing service it already provides. It’s also a basic numbers game, in 2009 Last.fm announced it had over 30 million members, compared to over 750 million members at Facebook.
Whatever the outcome this will shift the focus of digital music over the next few years. An important thing to note is that Facebook’s music partners are all champions of streaming music, not purchasing. We can all agree that streaming is where the industry is headed, but current strategies woefully underpay the artists for their work. Could the involvement of Facebook change this? Perhaps.
Facebook’s move could be the ultimate democratisation of music, a modern equivalent of the mixtape. But even when you made a mixtape you applied taste and a critical filter. Facebook are attempting to make sharing music passive. But filters are important to escape all this noise.
Nicholas Jones
Managing Editor
Spotify have made a nice video that goes some way to visually demonstrating how the new features will work. Watch it below
