Facebook To Launch Music Service With Spotify
blogs.forbes.com
blogs.forbes.com
"Facebook users will see a Spotify icon appear on the left side of their newsfeed"
"Clicking on the Spotify icon will install the service on their desktop in the background, and also allow users play from Spotify’s library of millions of songs through Facebook."
"The service will include a function that lets Facebook users listen to music simultaneously with their friends over the social network, one of the sources said."
"...but it will only be available for Facebook users in countries where Spotify has a presence, excluding the all-important United States."
"No money is changing hands with this partnership"
So it's not really a 'launch' or a 'music service'. It's an integration.
Having said that, I think the 'listen to the same music as your friends' bit is pretty interesting.
Unless all your friends have shitty taste.
note: I do find it a technically interesting feature
That's kind of cool, so you have a group of "friends" on facebook or whatever that you use for new music discovery?
edit: the poorly implied question would be what does using a generic social network get you that an account on a targeted site like last.fm doesn't have?
When my friends post links to youtube or soundcloud it's usually only for tracks they really like. Newness is a good criteria for posting, as is good stuff you may not have listened to in a years.
You can do all this with last.fm, but for whatever reason no one I know uses it as such. Facebook, irc and message boards seem to be the best places for me to learn about new music.
You can always tune the same radio station... :-)
I know you don't get to pick the songs, but it's an easy solution.
I'm expecting more headlines like this as Facebook heads towards IPO.
I love music but I have no clue about artist names, bands, etc. This is why I LOVE Pandora.
Just enter a familiar name, from the few that I know and I can spend hours listening to good music.
Actually is so good is annoying, because I have to constantly upvote all the songs.
I tried many many times to like Spotify, but Pandora wins by a long shot.
When I try to access it from here in the UK, the message reads:
We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S.
I guess I assumed since Facebook is based in the US this meant that Spotify would be available in the US too, but on second thought, I'm sure Facebook is big everywhere.
According to this website (http://www.nickburcher.com/2011/04/facebook-usage-statistics...) the US has 150 million, out of 600 million active facebook users (according to wiki), which puts it at about 25% of facebook's total share.
- This "icon" on the left of the homepage is simply a bookmark, a feature that any application on Facebook can choose to use.
- Facebook is an open platform and has yet to choose a winner among third parties for anything, and when they do they buy them and rebuild the product in house.
- Spotify does not work in the United States.
- Spotify simply has deep Facebook integrations, tech writers are either completely misunderstanding the information they stumbled upon OR they are blatantly turning this into a bigger story in order to get page views and attention.
It's very much like twitter for music in its social functionality. Once you've hunted out the profiles of your favourite artists and labels, logging onto its dashboard becomes a looked-forward-to treat, because you know that soundcloud is where artists put their tunes first, often before they're even finished.
It's basically taken over the actual use case that made myspace successful rather than the one they tried to monetise, which is a place for artists to interact with each other and for fans to go and listen to a snapshot of their current output. The difference is they have implemented it in a way that doesn't make you want to alternately scream/cry when using it.
Their genius is in not trying to get the public to use it. The interface is entirely aimed at artists. If you sign up and you don't have any music to upload, it says "zero tracks" under your name everywhere and you look like a loser. If you don't have at least some experience with music in a non listening capacity, then the whole interface is probably baffling.
This is a great move: it keeps out the general public who are never going to pay for the premium accounts, and it allows Soundcloud to concentrate on pushing the platform/api side of things, which is rightly what they are focusing on for the future.
The real question is, why have I written all that blurb about soundcloud in a thread about FB/spotify?
Why? Maybe this function will be an interesting experiment, but I just don't see it working out. Honestly, does anybody really care if their friend is listening to the same song (in a different geographic location) simultaneously? Where's the value added? What does anybody gain from this? Maybe social has a place in music, but this isn't it.
Edit: I'm not disputing the fact that bonding doesn't happen over music (clearly it does, as anybody who has ever listened to a song with another person would know), but I fail to see the purpose of simultaneous listening across the world.
Most of the time that isn't happening, but when we want to, it'd be nice to have something to help with that.
Not that it's a huge hassle to hit 'play' on whatever youtube video he sends. The 10-20 seconds of lag aren't really that important.
Think of it like talking on a webcam with your relatives back home, but with less talking and more shockin' out.
>but I fail to see the purpose of simultaneous listening across the world.
It's just the simple pleasure of knowing that over the other side of the world, your friend, who presumably responds to the music in the same or a similar way to you, is currently having that same response at the same time. This knowledge could reinforce the sensation of a shared experience, especially if you're recreating a shared listening experience from the past where you were physically together.
Obviously it doesn't really matter because you have no way of knowing what the other person is actually doing at that time unless you have some other out of band communication, a webcam or whatever. You would have the same sense of shared experience if spotify only told you it was syncing but actually didn't, how could you know? However, we are talking about emotional phenomena here and as such these logical stipulations don't really hit home.
EDIT: Also using it to synchronise two entire parties would be fun.
A quick Goog brings up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHOUTcast http://www.serverroom.us/shoutcast
You see that a friend with a similar taste in music to you listens to song you don’t know so you click to listen in. That would be useful. This integration also could allow your friends to play music for you. (“Hey, listen to this cool song I discovered!”) I find myself sharing links to songs (mostly some video on some video platform) all the time when chatting with friends, so maybe this will be an easier way to do that.
Whether or not this is actually useful depends in my opinion mostly on the UI and how easy to use it is. If it is more tedious than googling for the song and listening to it that way it won’t work.
Imagine a chat session with someone where you're listening to the same soundtrack (chosen by participant(s)). Potential for epic interactions.
Haven't you ever been in your friends car and heard a song on their CD and been like "wow that song is great, I wanna get it!" - same concept.
Music is so ineptly social.
Except this works with whatever website you're already listening to music from.
Also, the features they explained can all be achieved via a conventional facebook canvas app. A spotify icon in the left side? Isn't that just the app bookmark?
I think the title is probably just mega-linkbait. It's most likely Spotify just adding more facebook integration.
And not everything gets to become FarmVille.
Especially since there are lots of existing paid accounts which aren't connected to Facebook.
So, the facebook integration is an add-on for users that already use/can use spotify?