Facebook Music is Coming!
As reported earlier this year, Facebook has been rumored to announce an online music service to compete with iTunes and MySpace in the near future. — This just in: the "Facebook Music" platform will serve as the social networking giants first step into the music space.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's music push has been building all month: on October 5th All Facebook reported the company was preparing an iTunes competitor, and paidContent's follow-up on October 6th reframed it as a platform for bands aimed at MySpace rather than Apple, with a possible Apple tie-up in play. Today's announcement confirms Facebook Music is real and is the company's first step into the music space.
Which rival it targets remains the open question the two reports disagreed on — but either way, the largest social network entering music distribution puts pressure on the incumbent that built its identity around band pages, while the same week brings rumors of a cookie-tracking SocialAds product due November 6th that would give Facebook a monetization engine for whatever attention music pages attract.
First-order effects
- Bands and artists gain a native music presence inside Facebook, directly attacking MySpace's band-page franchise where its music audience actually lives.
- Apple's iTunes faces a new kind of competitor — one whose leverage is the social graph rather than hardware or store economics, per the framing in the October prior coverage.
Second-order effects
- MySpace must respond on its home turf, since Facebook Music converts friend networks — MySpace's core asset for musicians — into a distribution channel.
- Labels and rights holders get a second major negotiating counterweight to iTunes at exactly the moment Facebook's rumored SocialAds rollout offers advertisers a way to buy the resulting traffic.
Third-order effects
- If social graphs prove to be a viable discovery-and-distribution layer for recorded music, the industry's gatekeeping shifts from storefronts (iTunes) and profile farms (MySpace) toward whichever network owns the audience relationship.
- A confirmed Facebook entry also pressures every other social platform to treat media verticals — music first, video and others plausibly next — as core infrastructure rather than third-party embeds, recomposing each network's moat around owned content channels.
The trend: Social networks are moving from hosting user profiles to owning media distribution, with music as the first vertical where graph-driven discovery challenges dedicated incumbents like iTunes and MySpace.