Facebook Swears It’s A Tech Company, Not Media

Over the past few days I’ve been writing about the shift of social networks from technology companies to media companies at the Social Times. If you haven’t been paying attention, you might want to check out a post on Techcrunch today in which Mike Arrington argues that Facebook’s lack of a centrally controlled music service is damaging its domestic growth.

Last year I suggested that Facebook is supposed to be launching a music service after a source told me that he had spoken with somebody that interviewed for a position to run a music service. Mike Arrington says that it’s now clear that Facebook is sticking with iLike as its music partner. That was emphasized when iLike was announced as a launching member of Facebook’s Great Apps program.

Hadi discussed this during an interview with the Social Times. For Facebook to launch their own competing music service would be a bad political move but as Mike Arrington suggests, “Music is such a big category that is so completely dominated by MySpace, that it seems like they should have their overall music strategy under their direct control.”

So is music key to Facebook’s domestic growth? It’s clear that music is definitely one way to attract outside visitors. Millions of bands and artists use MySpace as their central location for promoting their work and that means millions of visitors being promoted to the site. Is there another channel that Facebook can target that has the same level of self-promoting activities?

Not that I know of. Is there any other group that you think Facebook should be targeting?

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Comments (One Response)

I disagree quite strongly with you here. Your speaking as though control for the sake of control is good, without backing this up at all. The only upside to controlling a music system would be…. revenue! A very large part of this is likely to come from sales of digital music. But hang on a minute; we already know that Facebook is working on a payments system. If iLike do what they do best (handle the music community application) and Facebook do what they do best (create open structured platforms to facilitate other applications) then Facebook get to benefit through a cut of the sales revenue from all the upside of the iLike music community, without having to change their focus, piss off developers and go up against one of their top applications and best case study (as well as make it almost impossible to raise funding to make apps).

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