Facebook's Music Play Revealed

Facebook is making significant changes to its user experience. As part of its new Timelines redesign, Facebook announced at its recent f8 conference that is integrating a series of social media apps, including music, TV and movies. As part of its move to become more of a media platform, Facebook has smartly decided to sidestep the music-licensing process and partner with other existing services.

Facebook will integrate various music services into the Facebook experience. The key music partners, to start with, are Spotify and iheartradio. However, Facebook will also be integrating with other music services such as Rdio, MOG, Rhapsody, Deezer, SoundCloud, VEVO, Songza, Turntable.fm, Slacker, Earbits, EventBrite, Ticketfly, ScoreBig and MixCloud. On the movie and TV side, Hulu and Netflix will be key partners at the start.

The way it works is that Facebook users who listen to music using one of these services will be able to (if they choose) share that information on Facebook. There will be a “Music” button on the left hand side if the Facebook user has accessed music from any of the music partners. The shared playlists will be interoperable, i.e., a user can create a shared playlist using Spotify and a friend can access that playlist using MOG.