14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is continuing to improve the music experience on the site. The Open Graph enabled a lot of music streaming services to have access to a lot more users. Now it's helping them even more with a Listen button on bands' Facebook pages.
The Listen button, as you'd expect, enables users to listen to music from that artist, but the nice part is that the button will open the music app the user subscribes to, Spotify, MOG, Deezer and so on.
"Today Facebook launched a Listen button for all musician Pages. The new button will give fans an easy way to listen to their favorite artist or band's music right from their Facebook Pages using services like Spotify and MOG," Facebook announced.
One of the big problems with music online, and there are plenty, is the "fragmentation." Different people use different services and many of them are not available in the same places. This makes sharing hard if not impossible.
Sharing though is at the heart of Facebook and the company is doing its best to unify the online music landscape.
The first step was to enable music streaming services to integrate. With auto-sharing enabled, these services could take advantage of the viral nature of the site. But this was still a competition, one that Spotify dominated.
The latest move is about abstractization. It no longer matters what service you use, all that matters is the music you want to listen to.
The new button is great for everyone. Facebook gets to add music to its pages, users get easy access to the stuff they want to listen to, bands get more people to listen to their music and streaming services get more people using them.
This has been Facebook's vision all along and it's the reason why it created the new Open Graph APIs. Music was a relatively easy target, but you can imagine the same type of buttons for other stuff, perhaps a "Watch" button that opens up whatever video streaming service you use.