Facebook will launch its much-rumored music platform at next month’s f8 developers’ conference, CNBC reported this afternoon.
Rather than go up against the likes of Spotify, Rdio and MOG, Facebook will instead be partnering with those music streaming services. While few details are known for sure, it looks as though the social behemoth is aiming to offer a way to listen to music from third party sources from within Facebook itself.
If this is indeed how the music feature will be implemented, it stands to give Facebook the benefit of even deeper user engagement on what is already the stickiest website in the world. Perhaps the biggest payoff would be for the streaming services, who will suddenly have direct exposure to Facebook’s enormous user base of over 750 million people (or at least the percentage of them that live within each service’s geographic coverage area).
Rumors began swirling about a Facebook partnership with Spotify just prior to that music subscription service’s U.S. launch in July. If these latest reports are correct, it would appear that Facebook is planning on teaming up with not only Spotify, but several of its main competitors as well. Facebook joins Apple, Google and Amazon in a group of tech giants now offering some kind of music service to its users.
It should be an interesting Fall in the digital music space, as Apple launches its iTunes Match and iCloud integration, Facebook introduces its music platform and Spotify continues to try and live up to its ambitious growth goals only a few months into its existence in the United States.
Facebook’s f8 conference will take place in San Francisco on September 22. ReadWriteWeb will be there, so expect extensive coverage of the music service announcement and whatever comes out of the annual event.
