Facebook intends to launch its long-rumored music service next month with Spotify, MOG and Rdio as three of the company’s launch partners.
The music and media platform will be announced at Facebook’s f8 developer conference on Sept. 22. It will allow users to listen to music from within Facebook.com. Evidence of Facebook’s music platform first surfaced in the code of Facebook’s video chat service.
According to two sources familiar with the matter, Facebook will not directly host or stream any music or media. Instead, it will rely on partners to provide the content. This is in contrast to Apple, Google and Amazon’s strategy of hosting music content on their servers. Facebook’s plan is to become a platform for media content in the same way it is a platform for applications and games.
One of our sources specifically mentioned three music services as launch partners: Spotify, Rdio and MOG. It’s unclear whether Facebook has lined up other launch partners for its music platform or whether Facebook will open up its platform to other developers. One of our sources noted, however, that Facebook doesn’t like playing favorites, so our bet is that Facebook will open up its music platform to other third-party developers.
We’ve also heard whispers that Facebook intends for this platform to go beyond music — for example, it’s possible that Netflix could stream movies through Facebook. However, we don’t know if Facebook will go beyond the music platform announcement at f8.
Update: “There’s nothing new to announce,” a Facebook spokesperson told us. “Many of the most popular music services around the world are integrated with Facebook and we’re constantly talking to our partners about ways to improve these integrations.”
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