Facebook is apparently planning to launch a new music initiative by partnering with Spotify and other music services, GigaOm reports. That alone isn’t surprising, since focusing on music and media makes complete sense for Facebook after finding success with games.
But Facebook’s music initiative gets a lot more interesting if we consider it alongside last week’s reveal of Project Spartan, an HTML5-driven mobile Facebook platform that could end up housing a slew of web apps. The combination of Project Spartan and Facebook’s new media focus could lead to a robust mobile music service that would take advantage of existing services like Spotify, Last.FM, and Rdio, while also becoming yet another thorn in Apple’s side.
On the desktop side, Facebook is gearing up to introduce a new Music Dashboard that will serve as the hub of your social music life, according to GigaOm. The Dashboard will house music recommendations, a steady stream of your friends’ music activity and the like. Facebook is also planning to introduce a persistent play and pause button that will sit near the chat icon while you’re browsing the site.
Now imagine those features replicated in a snappy HTML5 mobile environment. While Facebook’s new music focus will certainly find its fans on the desktop side, on mobile devices it has the potential to be the new go-to spot for finding and sharing music. And since Facebook is in talks with existing music services, there’s a good chance that it will be free as well (at least, initially).
Last week, we also learned that Facebook was working on a snazzy new photo sharing app, which tells us that the company is clearly aiming to improve its mobile offerings. With streaming music on the rise, Facebook could cement itself as a leader in that arena as well.
The door is also wide open for Facebook to lay claim to the mobile streaming music marketplace, since Apple still hasn’t launched a true streaming music service yet (both iCloud and iTunes Match offering music synchronization, but not streaming). And with the participation of existing music services, Facebook could end up being a major threat to both Amazon and Google’s cloud music ambitions.source
