THE SKINNY ON FACEBOOK-SPOTIFY
In the left-hand column, right where Facebook lists Photos, Friends, Places, Groups, Deals, Pages, and Games, you will find a new tab called Music. This tab will show up if a user has listened to music with one of Facebook’s partner music services.
Clicking on this new tab will open a page called Music Dashboard.
The Persistent Playback/Pause Button at the bottom of the Facebook page, where currently you have the chat icon. This button essentially is like a quick snapshot and controller of the music experience. Mouse over it and you can see what is playing on whatever service you might be logged into using Facebook Connect. It also allows you to play or pause a track once you discover it on Facebook. It is also linked to the play buttons in the news feed.
A page with snapshot of all the songs you have listened to on any specific service and also your top tracks and the number of times you have listened to those tracks.
The Music Dashboard will have the following features:
Music Notifications: here you have notifications that show if your friends have listened to songs recommended by you or on your profile.
Recommended Songs: You can get a list of songs heard and recommended by your friends. You can also play them back by clicking the play icon.
Top Songs from friends.
Top Albums from friends, with cover art.
Recent listens from your friends.
In the upper-right corner there will be a “happening now” ticker that shows what is happening in your social and musical universe, including songs that your friends are playing. There is some talk that this “Happening Now ticker” would show-up all throughout your music experience and not just on the music dashboard.
As Malik notes, Facebook’s push for integrating with Spotify is clearly predicated on the company’s need to keep everyone coming back to the site—especially with an IPO potentially in the offing.
This is fundamentally what Apple was going for with Ping, but, as Malik points out, that became one of the Cupertino colossus’ rare fuck-ups.
Meanwhile, a story on CNET quotes from an email it received from Spotify last month: “We’ve a good relationship with Facebook in that we have an integration [on Facebook]. We’re continuously working together to make the social experience on Spotify the best it can be.”
As Malik points out, as we become an always-connected society, the idea of downloading and buying music is slowly giving way to the idea of subscription, and Facebook’s music plans are aimed at capitalizing on just such a future.
