Facebook Music never really caught up, but there seem to be some major developments taking place as we talk. Facebook has planned to integrate music services delivered by other services and would enable scrobbling.
Those of you who are not familiar with the term may not be users of Last.fm.As a music lover, I am usually hooked to my Last.fm account almost all the time, and it is available even in the nether regions of the world as long as you pay $3 a month. Spotify is not available in many countries, and MOG and Rdio are available only in North America. Last.fm allows you to share the music that you are listening to on your phone, your computer, your media player etc, with your friends on Last.fm. There are several apps that already allow you to scrobble (update your Last.fm history with the songs that you listen to, without actually doing anything) music that you listen to, to your Last.fm account. Facebook intends to make this a feature of its music service, and as far as we know, they are working towards getting Rdio, Spotify and MOG to Facebook Music.
The new service would allow listeners to scrobble whatever they are listening to on their favourite music streaming service to their friends on Facebook. Friends can tune into the scrobbled list using the service that they use as long as it is supported by Facebook. This would mean, almost 750 million people would begin to scrobble music to their friends, and that really is big news for the music industry. However, the details are so hazy at the moment that one can’t really say anything. If Facebook ties up with only Spotify, Rdio and MOG, chances are Facebook Music would be available in select countries of Europe and North America. However, if they tie up with Last.fm, Grooveshark or even Pandora, the possibilities of scrobbling music could be endless. In fact, it might change the way we listen to music.
Josh Costine, who works with Facebook, shared thoughts on the possibilities of a desktop software by Facebook which would allow you to scrobble from iTunes or even import your list from there to listen to the same on the services mentioned above. He also ‘wondered’ in his tweet what a partnership with Last.fm, the original streaming service that made the word ‘scrobble’ popular, would lead to. While Rdio, Spotify, MOG, and other services are available in select locations, Grooveshark, Last.fm and certain other streaming services are available in many other countries, which would help Facebook to let its users scrobble more. If things turn out well for Facebook, all the 750 million users would be scrobbling to their Facebook Music accounts.
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