Not even two weeks in, Spotify’s integration with Facebook already appears to be paying off in terms of application usage. The streaming service’s Facebook app has seen a 55% rise in usage since Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced the new integration at the f8 conference on September 22.
This growth comes despite a recent outcry among some users, who object to Spotify’s new policy of requiring people to sign up using their Facebook accounts.
Since rolling out their deep integration with the social networking giant, Spotify has seen monthly active users of its Facebook application rise from 3.4 million to 5.3 million, according to new metrics from AppData. It’s worth noting that these numbers don’t refer to overall Spotify sign-ups, but rather users who are using the service’s official Facebook application. The company has yet to divulge how many new sign-ups they’ve seen since peeling back the “closed beta” label and launching its Facebook integration last month.
This type of growth is exactly why Spotify and similar services have signed on with Facebook. The site’s 800 million-strong user base is unmatched in the social networking space. Meanwhile, services like Spotify, MOG and Rdio have built impressive music libraries, something Facebook is not interested in trying to replicate. Instead, these partnerships allow both parties to do what they do best while piggybacking off each other’s strengths.
These new content partnerships have not been without controversy. In addition to complaints over Spotify requiring a Facebook account to sign up, some have expressed concerns about the privacy implications of the frictionless sharing that Facebook is now encouraging.
Even so, it would appear that despite these concerns, Spotify is indeed benefiting from being baked so thoroughly into the Facebook experience, at least for the time being.