Just last week we wrote about the MySpace acquisition of iLike and this week it appears that some form of agreement between Facebook and Spotify is in the works according to Techcrunch. The rumor is based on a status update by Mark Zuckerberg in which he simply stated “Spotify is so good.” While Mark may be a victim to the classic “shiny object syndrome” found in much of Silicon Valley, he probably wouldn’t have written the update had something not been in the works.
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There’s been a bunch of coverage of the iLike acquisition deal over the past 24 hours including those that call this a massive blow Facebook. The primary “losers” in this supposed $20 million MySpace acquisition is iLike, who has been struggling to find a breakthrough business model. There’s also an underlying story about how the Partovi brothers and Mark Zuckerberg grew apart since the early launch of the platform.
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When the Facebook platform launched two years ago there were hundreds of copycats of successful applications that popped up almost instantaneously. Two years later we are back in the same position except this time it’s big app developers stealing from each other. Flixster and iLike have literally stolen entire chunks of Living Social’s extremely popular Pick 5 application which has attracted over 14 million users in a couple of weeks.

Early on the Facebook platform was considered the wild west but it appears that not much has actually changed. Large developers publicly steal from other developers which occasionally end up in costly legal battles. This time around there’s no indication that it will end up in court but for large developers with millions of dollars of funding and cash flow, directly ripping off other companies seems like a pretty weak strategy. Then again Facebook directly rips off features of other companies, such as the “Like” feature on feed stories which was lifted from FriendFeed.
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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?