Today Facebook released a new feature called ‘Music Stories’. Right now it is only available for people who use a iPhone and have an Apple Music or Spotify account. With this new feature you can share the music you like with all your friends. You can post a link of a song you like on your timeline and your friends can listen to 30 seconds of the song.
Sharing your music with your friends is not new, many companies tried it before but it never really was a success. Apple tried to do something like this in 2010 with Ping (recode.net). Also Facebook tried it in 2011 with frictionless sharing. Ping failed because Apple and Facebook failed to work together and frictionless sharing was also not a success because people did not want to be annoyed by all the messages of what music their friends were listening to.
The new sharing function is really easy to use and only a small new feature. On Apple Music or Spotify you click on a link that you would like to share a song, you post the link you get on your Facebook, and on Facebook people can listen to 30 seconds of the song. If they have an Apple Music or Spotify account as well and they like the song, they can add it directly to their own playlists. This is a small video to show you how it works.
There is also a possibility that this is the start of something bigger. Facebook has not done a lot with music videos so far, but with ‘Music Stories’ they make a start. Right now all the music videos are on YouTube and especially on the Vevo channels. Vevo is owned by music labels. Right now they need to post everything on YouTube, but this contract expires next year. Also a lot of labels talk about how they dislike YouTube because you can listen to all the songs for free. With Facebook starting to make a move into music videos, maybe we can see Vevo shifting to Facebook in the future?
Kafka, P. (2015), Facebook Lets You Share Music With Your Friend, http://recode.net/2015/11/05/facebook-lets-you-share-music-with-your-friends/.
