Facebook has held early talks with the major music labels, future plans may involve the company's video platform
Facebook is talking with music labels, but why? — Facebook has held talks with the major labels about “getting into music,” multiple sources tell The Verge.
Context & Ripple Effects
In July 2015 Facebook was still on the outside of music looking in: no licenses, and a feed full of user videos carrying unlicensed tracks. These early 'getting into music' talks with the majors were the opening move of a five-year arc that ran from a reported Spotify-style streaming service within months of this story, to licensing talks reframed around policing copyright violations in user-generated videos, to an audio-matching system to find and remove infringing clips.
What makes the video-platform angle prescient is how it resolved: by late 2019 Facebook was pursuing music video rights specifically to prop up Watch, testing in Thailand and India, and by mid-2020 had closed deals with Sony, Universal, and Warner for the right to show music videos and exclusive artist content. The 2015 conversation about 'getting into music' ended up being settled on video surfaces, not a streaming app.
First-order effects
- The major labels — Sony, UMG, Warner among them per later reporting — gain a new, massive buyer at the negotiating table, one whose leverage is distribution reach rather than per-stream economics.
- Facebook's own users are affected immediately in the background: without licenses, their videos using label music remain infringement targets, which is why the parallel enforcement-system work matters.
Second-order effects
- Streaming incumbents like Spotify — the model Facebook was reported to be cloning a week after these talks — would face a competitor that monetizes attention and ads rather than subscriptions, changing what labels can demand from both.
- Artists and labels get a second bidding market: once Facebook secured rights, it approached artists about exclusive video content, giving them an alternative to YouTube-style exclusivity.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, licensed music becomes table stakes for any platform hosting user-generated video — enforcement tooling first, then blanket licenses, then premium video content — shifting the majors' revenue base from unit sales and streams toward platform licensing deals.
- Social feeds consolidate into direct competitors to dedicated music services, with the deciding asset being the video surface (Watch here) rather than a standalone app — a structure Meta carried forward under its later rebranding.
The trend: Social platforms are converting copyright enforcement problems into licensing relationships, turning their video feeds into negotiated distribution channels for the major labels.