David Emery Online

Music on your face

8 October 2007

If you were paying attention to my last Friday Links post you’ll see that I linked to a post about the possibility that Facebook might turn into a MP3 store – a fully fledged iTunes and Amazon rival.

It turns out, though, that they may be doing something much more interesting.

According to this post Facebook is not working on a iTunes rival, but a fully fledged platform for musicians and record labels. So, they’re not going after Apple at all…

...they’re tying to kill MySpace.

It’s funny, and quite typical of the pace of the industry (that can be so easy to forget sometimes), that a year (maybe even 6 months) ago the idea of a credible competitor to MySpace sounded pretty laughable. Sure, there were plenty of other networks milling around trying to get a slice of the pie (Tagworld, Haystack, iMeem et al) but none of them ever seemed like they would catch on (and it turns out they didn’t).

The big difference previously between MySpace and Facebook has been the absence of music, and in fact it doesn’t seem to have made much if any dent on Facebook’s popularity. It’s a pretty good indicator of how relevant the music aspect of MySpace was to its success: not really at all. People came for the music, and stayed for the social interaction. You would have thought this migration to Facebook would have been a bit of a wake up call to the music industry – “Hey, all those friends on your MySpace might not have been genuine fans” – but no-one really seems to have cottoned on yet.

At the moment there’s been no natural outlet for a band of label on Facebook – do you set up a new person to represent an artist, or a group, or maybe even an application? – so it will be very interesting to see what kind of effect the new additions have to the spread of music. Facebook commands a huge amount of power and influence and it certainly has the power to take word-of-mouth promotion to a whole new level. Or, on the flip side, it could be completely un-organic and rely on the deep pockets of the major labels to get good coverage on the music pages – at this stage it really could go either way, all though obviously I’d prefer a level playing field.

Finally, on the original rumour that Facebook are coming out with an iTunes competitor: sure, I bet they are, in as much as the Snocap stores on MySpace are an iTunes competitor. Now that the DRM walls have mostly fallen, expect to see a whole raft of MP3 stores crop up in places you wouldn’t normally expect them. A lot of them will be white-label powered (probably by people like 7digital) and none of them will do massive volume, and hence none of them individually will topple iTunes. However, I can see that really quite quickly in aggregate they could start toppling iTunes – the long tail and all that – and then the digital music landscape really will be quite different.