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Facebook announces back-end rejigs, and resulting content services

By | Published on Friday 23 September 2011

Facebook

So, Team Facebook had a big party in San Francisco yesterday, they danced a little dance, jigged a little jig, and drank some fruity cocktails. Good times. But all eyes were on the big speech from Facebook supremo Mark Zuckerberg who – for those who’d not seen the social networking king ‘do a Steve Jobs’ before – turns out to be a very tedious man indeed. But still, he was updating the world on some big changes on the Facebook platform, so we persevered with the tedium.

Of course everybody knew music was part of the big announcement. We also already knew that Zuckerberg’s company has no aspirations to become a content provider itself, rather it is keen to encourage people to access and use existing content services run by other companies via the Facebook interface, locking content experiences to the Facebook environment, in return allowing digital content firms the opportunity to have a more obvious presence within the social network, and to make it easier for existing users to plug those services to their friends.

And that’s exactly what Facebook Music will do. No less, and for time being at least, no more. What it means is that users of any participating music service will be able to allow Facebook to track their activity – what they are listening to – and to share that data with their friends and followers in real time via the new update stream, or ‘ticker’, that has appeared on the Facebook interface. Friends, should they wish, will then be able to listen to the same tracks at the click of a button – via whatever content service the first user is using – and if they want to they can chat about them within the Facebook platform.

Most major digital music services will be involved in some way, though it was Spotify that Zuckerberg focused on, while his CTO Bret Taylor spent quite some time going through how Clear Channel Radio’s in-the-process-of-revamping I Heart Radio venture will take advantage of Facebook’s new data sharing functionality.

Neither of the new services demoed actually seemed that exciting. This certainly wasn’t the music revolution Zuckerberg and Spotify’s Daniel Ek seemed to imply they were about unleash. Much of what will be possible under Facebook Music can already be done by combining other existing services with Facebook or other social media (albeit, perhaps, less seamlessly), and many of the innovations regarding music do seem to be a total Last.fm rip off. Plus some possible developments we thought might come – Would services like Spotify now work through the browser? Would people signed up to rival music services be able to bond around the same artists with different sources of content? – are not included.

That said, Facebook Music may not be a revolution, but it may well result in some evolution, for two main reasons. First, even the most successful legit digital music services are really still niche products used by committed music fans. Facebook, on the other hand, has gone mainstream. Bringing the Spotify, MOGs and I Heart Radios of the world – and similar services in other genres like TV, movies and news – more overtly into the Facebook experience could help these companies build a more mainstream customer base. Which would be to everyone’s advantage.

And second, and perhaps more importantly, what’s happening behind the scenes at Facebook to make these new functions work is possibly more exciting than the services that will use that new functionality at launch. Providing people choose to allow Facebook to monitor their online lives, the service can automate the process of recommendation, and automatically build communities around interests, new and old, based both on talk and activity. That’s potentially quite powerful. Though whether those services using this new Facebook functionality have truly harnessed that power as yet, possibly not.

Anyway, here are some quotes:

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg: “The last five years of social networking have been about getting people signed up. Until recently people weren’t sure how long the phenomenon would last. Now social networks are a ubiquitous tool used by billions of people around the world to stay connected every day … Now we are making it so you can connect to anything you want. Now you don’t have to like a book, you can just read a book. You don’t have to like a movie; you can just watch a movie”.

Spotify boss Daniel Ek (to Robert Scoble): “[Zuckerberg] started using Spotify two or three years ago and really liked the product. Sean Parker is an investor in Spotify too. I think we were definitely in sync that music is one of the most powerful social objects there is, I don’t know who took the first step, but we’re really focused on getting more people to engage with music on Facebook”.

Rhapsody President John Irwin (via the New York Post): “The more you help people discover music, the more social it is, the more they will be engaged. If they’re more engaged, then they’re more likely to subscribe”.

VEVO CEO Rio Caraeff (via The Guardian): “Today’s announcement is a big step forward in Vevo’s mission to bring more music to more fans in more places. A deeper integration with Facebook will help VEVO grow its scale and reach to new heights, while better targeting our connected, socially-savvy audience”.



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