Less than two months ago Facebook had its big f8 event where they launched their music integration amongst other things. At that event Spotify was heavily features alongside MOG, Rdio and others.
I think that everyone expected some degree of success – I mean, folks already share EVERYTHING (often WAY too much) on Facebook … so why not this?!? And the results have been phenominal, with a report at Mashable saying:
Facebook users have shared their listening activity more than 1.5 billion times with their friends, says Facebook’s Casey Maloney Rosales Muller in a blog post published Tuesday.
“Developers have started to demonstrate that when music is discovered through friends, people listen to more music and a wider variety of artists,” he writes. “Our hypothesis was that integrating with the Open Graph would accelerate music discovery and make it a more valuable part of the Facebook experience, while improving key metrics for our partners.”
But according to the report it is not just massive sharing that has occurred, the benefits to music services like MOG and Rdio have been HUGE.
Here are some of the amazing gains:
Spotify: Four million people have joined Spotify since Sept. 22. The service became available in the U.S. on July 14.
MOG: Mog saw a 246% growth Facebook users since f8.
Rdio: Facebook has increased Rdio’s new user registrations 30-fold.
Slacker: Available across mobile, TV, auto and web, Slacker saw a more than 11x increase in monthly active users in the month following f8.
Earbits: This Y Combinator-funded startup experienced a 1,350% increase in the number of users becoming fans of the band they’re listening to.
These are some amazing numbers, but let’s temper them for a second – I checked my profile and was reminded that pretty much EVERYTHING gets shared – so while just having Pat Metheny’s Secret Story playing in the kitchen generates 14 shares, and on and on. So while there is a ton of sharing, much of it is also coming from folks just listening to music – but since you now MUST have a Facebook account to use these services, the numbers are deceptive.
The other thing is the subscribers – right now we are seeing massive numbers trying out all of the services. But once they start looking for money, who will stay and who will go? Ultimately THAT is the question – it is wonderful to have all this sharing and all of these sign-ups, but these are all companies that need money to survive … and are counting on Facebook Music to help them reach those goals.
Source: Mashable