Forget that halloween party you were planning on going to tonight and stay in to watch the Foo Fighters streaming live from Studio 606 on their Facebook Page. So far over 10,000 fans have registered to watch the event which is being powered by Livestream (formerly Mogulus). This form of streaming event is becoming increasingly popular, all of which tend to have the same layout: a streaming video service combined with Facebook’s live stream widget.
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A Facebook music service has been rumored about for three years now, but according to Brad Stone, the first official integration with Facebook will come from Lala who will integrate the service into the Facebook gift store. This comes as news of a partnership between Lala, iLike, and Google first surfaced this morning.
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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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I’ve been searching for a Facebook application that lets you share the full version of songs within your feed. While applications like iLike provide licensed 30 second samples, none of the applications that I’ve found make it easy to share full songs directly to your feed. There previously was the Music application which let you post full songs but that was disabled in a short amount of time as it violated Facebook terms and a little thing called “the law”.
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Lala is a small music streaming service in comparison to more prominent sites like Last.fm, but Eric Eldon reports that Lala may be leading the bid for a partnership with Facebook for a streaming music option.
Having an integrated streaming music service is something Facebook has been planning for some time, and has reportedly been feeling out a number of music services including Project Playlist for a partnership. What Facebook wants is an on-demand streaming music offering that’s similar to MySpace Music. But as VentureBeat points out, that’s not the type of service Lala currently has.
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A couple weeks ago I wrote about MTVMusic.com on Social Times. The service makes MTV’s entire music video library available for the general public. It’s an impressive site and best of all, you can take the videos and embed them anywhere. If you didn’t think mainstream media would ever embrace new media, this will prove you wrong.
At Web 2.0 Summit yesterday, John Battelle questioned Chris DeWolfe of MySpace about what he’d do if he woke up one morning and found out that Facebook had launched a service with iTunes. While Chris didn’t speculate as to what actions he would take it was clearly not a bad idea. So what is holding Facebook back?
The first issue would be the release of a music service which competes directly with existing applications such as iLike. Mark Zuckerberg historically has a relatively close relationship with the Partovi brother who run iLike. One would imagine that this has something to do with iLike being featured in the “Great Apps” program which increases invite limits to 60 per users in addition to other benefits.
Another issue would be that it would require iTunes being interested. Ultimately the combination of music products and community is a killer combination and iTunes and Facebook are both the worldwide leaders in each respective category. Yesterday, Chris DeWolfe explained how MySpace Music is heavily focused on community as it integrates directly into the MySpace network.
Imagine being able to load up your iTunes application and start playing your favorite tunes and check out what your Facebook friends are purchasing and listening to (as pictured below). This would be a killer combination and given that iTunes has become one of the primary (if not the primary) music players for consumers, this would provide both with a massive opportunity.
Such an agreement would also make it so that Facebook could avoid having to negotiate agreements directly with music industry executives. Instead Facebook gets to focus on what they do best and Apple focuses on what they do best. Facebook also gets to generate revenue through recommended music.
This sort of revenue model brings up one other inherent conflict: why use Facebook for the community component when Apple can launch their own? The only answer I have for that is so that the information is more readily available. If a user’s profile is updated with the music they’re listening to and a link to iTunes, there is a much larger marketing opportunity for Apple beyond their existing user base.
Aside from that, a Facebook partnership with Apple iTunes is little more than speculation at this point. It makes a lot of sense though.
Over the past year and a half, rumors of Facebook music have come and gone. We even had sources previously report to us about an executive search going on for an individual to run the Facebook music arm. Today the New York Post is reporting that in the wake of MySpace Music launching last month, Mark Zuckerberg has stated plans to enter into the online music business.
While details are sketchy at this point, apparently Zuckerberg is talking to existing song-streaming services including iLike, Rhapsody, imeem, and Lala about outsourcing their music service. They aren’t keeping any options off the table and are talking directly with “major record companies about the strategy.” Apparently they don’t want to deal with “securing their own licenses to distribute music, or building a proprietary service from scratch” though.
Nothing is imminent though and based on source that I spoke with last month, while Facebook continues to talk with music executives there is still internal conflict at the company about any new music service. Does talk of a music service mean that a launch is guaranteed? Not at all and just as the New York Post reports, “Facebook may ultimately walk away from the plan altogether”.
Ultimately I’m not sure that Facebook’s activities are a direct response to the launch of MySpace Music as I’ve been hearing these rumors for at least a couple months. The Post claims that “the concept is believed to have peaked” though “now that MySpace is live with its service”. The future of a Facebook music service still seems unclear at this point, but you can never give up a good opportunity to speculate about future plans!
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?
