Facebook has begun alerting Page admins that the official Music Player app it developed years ago will no longer be available after today. The app allowed Page admins to upload an MP3 and add track information, and the song would then be shared to the news feed where it could be streamed in-line. The same app seems to power the ability for users to post songs to the news feed by adding the URLs of MP3s to the publisher.

Facebook says “The Facebook Music Player app is being replaced with better ways to incorporate music on your Page”, and a Help Center entry then encourages users and admins to post music videos instead of songs and use third-party apps. Facebook could be developing its own basic Page tab application to allow musicians to share music. Alternatively, it may be trying to avoid copyright issues and clear the way for third-party music sharing apps including Spotify and RootMusic’s BandPage.

The notice of the removal of the Music Player app starting October 31 is appearing at the top of Pages to their admins. It follows similar alerts about Facebook discontinuing the Discussions and Reviews Page tab apps. In those cases it also said new tools are coming but that for now Pages should use their wall as a forum and host for reviews.

Promoting Third-Party Music Page Tab Apps

Facebook does not currently offer its own Page tab app for permanently hosting streaming music, and rather allows third-party developers such as RootMusic, ReverbNation, and Bandcamp to provide musician profile apps. These apps have grown popular as bands flee the deteriorating Myspace Music for Facebook.

While these services let artists share their songs for in-line news feed streaming, they are more complex and take more time to set up than Music Player. Facebook could introduce a lightweight tab app replacement for Music Player’s 5,000 monthly active users, or simply leave that problem for third-parties to solve.

If Facebook does prevent MP3 files from being shared and played through the news feed, users could comply with Facebook’s request to share videos instead, which don’t have the same copyright issues as they’re generally hosted on services such as YouTube that scan for unlicensed usage of songs. Still, it could disrupt behavior of independent musicians who hosted MP3s themselves and wanted to share them with their Facebook friends without setting up a Page or video service account.

Favoring Streaming Music Partners Over MP3s

At f8, Facebook announced partnerships with music services Spotify, Rdio, and more to allow listening activity of Facebook users to be published to their profiles and the news feeds of their friends. When users click links in these stories, the corresponding music app launches to play a song.

As part of these partnerships, Facebook may be trying to move users away from MP3 files that are commonly used to illegally share music. It could be seen as violating copyright by by hosting MP3 files uploaded to Music Player.

By discontinuing Music Player, Facebook can push to find the song they wanted to share on Spotify or another service and share it that way. This could please partners, but also aid Facebook if it ever starts allowing users to buy subscriptions to paid streaming services with Facebook Credits from which it takes a 30% tax.

In the end, Facebook may have seen little need to continue supporting the Music Player app. There are better Page tab apps available from third-parties, it competed with Facebook’s music partners, and it presented copyright infringement risks.

We’re awaiting a response from Facebook regarding whether  it is developing its own music Page tab app and whether MP3 URLs will still be allowed to be shared to the news feed and streamed in-line. We’ll update this article with the company’s response.

[Image Credit: Chris J Politzki]

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

On-demand music service Rhapsody will acquire competitor Napster in an effort to expand its user base, the companies have announced. Under the terms of the agreement, Rhapsody will acquire all Napster subscribers and certain other assets. Meanwhile, Best Buy, Napster’s current owner, will receive a minority stake in Rhapsody.

The “other assets” that will move over to Rhapsody include Napster’s IP portfolio, however, no mention of Napster’s label contracts or deals were made in today’s announcement. Currently, Napster has a streaming music catalog of over 15 million songs, as well as apps for the desktop, mobile and TVs. The software also provides access to streaming music radio stations, thousands of playlists, offline music, charts and more.

Rhapsody, on the other hand, boasts a catalog of 13 million songs (according to the announcement – the website says 12 million), meaning Napster subscribers will be losing access to a good number of tracks in the transition. But Rhapsody’s other offerings, including cross-platform apps, playlists and a radio feature, are similar to what Napster previously offered.

The acquisition comes at a time when newer startups like Spotify, MOG and Rdio are stealing the spotlight from older brands like Napster and Rhapsody. A clue that Napster was on its way out came last week when Rhapsody was listed among the services receiving Facebook Music integration while Napster was not.

The deal will close on November 30th, says the report. The amount Rhapsody paid was not disclosed.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The online music race is now an all-out sprint: Amazon, Google, and Apple are now all offering (or preparing to launch) services that let you upload your music collection to the cloud, letting you listen to the music you own wherever you are. But they aren’t just competing with each other — another group of services that includes MOG, Rdio, and (eventually) Spotify lets users stream any song as often as they’d like for a reasonable monthly rate of around $10 a month.

It’s getting fun. And today, MOG is making the race all that much closer.

The service has just rolled out a new Beta player to users that streamlines the MOG experience, putting a much heavier emphasis on building out playlists and recommendations than its predecessor did.

Up until now, MOG users have been using a Flash-based player that appeared in a popup — you navigate the site in your main browser pane, adding songs as you go, and those songs are added to your playlist, which you control in the smaller popup window. It works fine, but compared to services that have adopted a more iTunes-like interface, it can be a little confusing.

The new player fixes that. It’ll look familiar to anyone who has used the MOG web app on the Chrome Web Store, which launched in December (it’s a variation on that player). But it includes some key additions, and it’s also rolling out as a beta option to all MOG users (previously the only way to access it was through the Chrome store, which many people don’t know about).

The new player actually has fewer features than the old one — it’s missing ratings and the ability to see the profiles of other users, for example. But, aside from a more intuitive and faster HTML5 interface, it adds features that are probably even more important: namely, recommendations and better playlist creation.

Now when you log into the new version of MOG, the service will look at your Facebook Likes (and the Likes of your friends) to start recommending artists immediately. I logged in with a test account populated with some of my favorite bands, and sure enough, the service immediately presented me with albums by The Darkness and Stevie Ray Vaughan.

MOG CEO David Hyman says that the team actually had some help from Facebook when it came to integrating this functionality. Hyman wouldn’t say anything about the rumored Facebook Music initiative that’s in the works, other than to say that he “hopes to do more great stuff with them in the future”.

MOG and other all-you-can-eat music services are increasingly competing on features like speed, recommendations and social sharing than they are on the size of their libraries. MOG already offers solid mobile applications, and this update makes the desktop experience significantly more compelling, especially for new users who are now met with a personalized homepage rather than a generic list of popular music.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Keep an eye on yet-to-be launched Picadee, a new Seattle startup getting some buzz. The company was founded by former iLike employees Marcus Womack, Mike Bohlander, Ray Fortna and Josh Hepfer, and has taken a seed round of funding from iLike founders Ali Partovi and Hadi Partovi.

The company isn’t saying what it’s doing yet, but this is a team that has performed well together before. They built iLike (see our first coverage), which was eventually acquired by MySpace. iLike was the original “Facebook Music” app. – for a time it was by far the most popular third party application on Facebook.

This is also the team that created the popular concert discovery app for the iPhone that was featured in a commercial.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook is preparing partnerships with several online music services including Spotify that will be hosted in a music dashboard, GigaOm reports. Users will be able to stream music, see what their friends are listening to, and share their own favorites — a realization of a long-time dream within the company to make music a core part of the site.

Beyond simply being a valuable way to find new music, the feature has the more practical benefit if increasing engagement, driving users to other parts of the site, and in doing so eventually producing ad revenue. For those in the online music industry, the big potential is in allowing users to buy songs or streaming subscriptions more easily than they have been before, with Facebook Credits

The Facebook Music Landscape

Music is a fundamental driver of sharing, and users are interested in learning about music and discussing it with their Facebook friends. 46 of the top 100 most popular Facebook Pages are music-related, as we covered recently. Music streaming Page tab app developer RootMusic this last week eclipsed Electronic Arts to control the second largest number of monthly active users behind Zynga.

Meanwhile, developers are experimenting with Facebook Credits as a digital content payment method. Warner Bros began renting films, and several bands are offering access to pay-per-view concert streaming video in exchange for Facebook’s virtual currency. Facebook is currently hiring a desktop software team, which might be building music scrobbling apps that relay a user’s listening habits.

The partnership with Spotify has been in the works for months, with Facebook employees gaining access to promotional accounts as the service tries to arrange licensing deals with the major U.S. record labels. Late last month, Forbes reported the partnership was almost ready to launch, but cited a specific Spotfiy dashboard rather than one incorporating multiple services.

Music Dashboard Features

Facebook’s Music Dashboard would be hosted as an official bookmark in the site’s left sidebar. Within it, users could recommend songs, stream recommendations of friends, see charts of the music most popular with friends, and view feeds of personal listening history and what friends are currently listening to.

A persistently play/pause button located next to the Chat feature would allow users to control playback as they browse around Facebook. This would facilitate huge amounts of listening time, and therefore advertising exposure.

Partnerships – Tech Giants or Music Sites

This latest news from GigaOm indicate that the Music Dashboard could host integrations with services including Pandora, Mog, Rdio, Last.fm, Grooveshark and more. This means users will be able to port their listening experience to Facebook regardless of which service they use. As Facebook is probably looking to secure the maximum numbers of users for the Music Dashboard, this model works much more effectively than an exclusive partnership with just Spotify.

There’s also the less likely possibility it would work with recently launched cloud music services from Amazon, Apple, and Google. Amazon makes the most sense, as the ecommerce giant has integrated its website with Facebook, and its MP3 downloads store is the underdog competing with Apple’s iTunes. Public relations tension withGoogle and the recent snub of a deep integration with Apple’s iOS 5 don’t bode well for a music partnership with those companies.

Music for Credits

With all the smaller music services in need of viral distribution and Amazon looking to beat iTunes, Facebook would have a lot of leverage in potential negotiations. Perhaps not immediately, but it could allow users to buy subscriptions or MP3s via Facebook Credits, off which it makes 30% – similar to iTunes’ fee.

The ability to learn about new music from friends, listen to it, and buy access all through Facebook could make the social network a digital content sales powerhouse without itself having to sign costly deals with the record labels.

Even if Facebook at first just provides affiliate links to buy or subscribe to music off-site, by aggregating the fractured music streaming and purchasing audience, it could come out on top regardless of which services succeed.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

When asked on stage today whether there will ever be a “Zynga of music” i.e. a company that leverages social in order to disrupt the music space Director of the Facebook Developer platform Ethan Beard said that Facebook is in fact in the music business.

“Spotify is Facebook Music,” Beard said, revealing that when Spotify, which has not yet launched in the US, integrated social features traffic to the site increased 4 times. Facebook is now the site’s number one referrer of traffic.

Beard emphasized that there is a lot of room for growth for music companies that integrate Facebook’s social features as well as Spotify has. “We want to focus on building out the building blocks of the social graph so companies can build on top of it,” Beard said.

The much buzzed about Spotify has been talking about a U.S. launch for well over a year, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch