"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"
Thanks for bringing this to my attention! I have a thing I like to do with friends called I call 'song sharing' in which we listen to the same song at the same time and write what we are picturing from the music. Once the song is over we all press enter and see what each other's visions were. It's a really interesting way to get to know someone.
> people that I follow what they listen to and vice versa.
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?
last.fm is great, but it generates a lot of noise (bands that I don't like that last.fm thinks I should like) and it doesn't allow me to instantly listen to what my friends are listening to.
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.
This title is misleading - Facebook is not launching a music service. Spotify already has a music service and it already integrates with Facebook in a nice way, though perhaps some people will like to launch it from the FB website, who knows. The simultaneous play feature is cute, but seems more like something they added for publicity.
I'm expecting more headlines like this as Facebook heads towards IPO.
"...it will only be available for Facebook users in countries where Spotify has a presence, excluding the all-important United States."
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.
Pandora is available in Spain? I was under the impression it was USA-only.
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.
This is what I don't get. Music companies make it so different for music services to operate internally, they want us to pay VPN companies to enjoy music, rather than paying them.
Facebook is not partnering with Spotify in any way.
- 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.
The announcement seems driven more by why Facebook would want (capturing users, adding a revenue stream) than what users would want (sharing musically cheaply and easily). Hard to see how this competes well with YouTube music videos. Seems like everyone is looking to connect social networking and music. MySpace has (kind of) held on because of the connection but there are many failures including the supposed music heavyweight Apple's Ping.
The real success here is Soundcloud. It's venerated by fans of underground electronic music, mainly due to its simple and effective social features.
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?
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.
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.
Many of my friendships involve a lot of bonding over music, as I'm sure do many other peoples'. If I were to suddenly become geographically distant to them, if I moved away to another country or whatever, I would imagine that being able to listen to music in sync with them in that way would be a pretty powerful thing. I'd definitely do it a lot.
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.
There is not much detail there about how the feature will actually be implemented but here are two scenarios:
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.
Spotify already does all of this (with Facebook integration, too). The new feature is supposed to be synchronisation (listening to a song at the same time as your friend).
Listening along with a friend who appreciates music as much as you do is great. Sometimes you don't have the liberty of be with them physically, so facebook is ready to provide the next best thing.
Just going to echo the chorus responding to you: It's a way of sharing context. When you ride with someone in their car, if music is being played it's being shared. Same with when you are with someone at a restaurant/bar.
Imagine a chat session with someone where you're listening to the same soundtrack (chosen by participant(s)). Potential for epic interactions.
I think this is interesting from a DJ or live mix-tape perspective. I have several friends who's taste in music I like. I would love it if they set aside an hour of "dj'ing" live. It is also interesting during a "chat" session.
It'd be nice if a music service came out that didn't revolve around introducing you to new music or alerting you to what your friends are listening to. Or one that realizes the music you might like could be based on more than other bands you and/or your friends are already into (would any of these services assume that a Metallica fan might also dig Katy Perry?). There's a limit to how much stuff Facebook needs tacked onto it. And how many "hubs" for media already exist? At what point does this start looking like putting the VCR inside the TV set?
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.
I hope there will be a way to just use Spotify without using Facebook. It seems like that could become obnoxious if I had to sign into Facebook every time I wanted to listen to music.
"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"