14 DAY TRIAL // Recent reports indicate that Apple might be partnering with Facebook, the latter moves to take on MySpace. A partnership between Facebook and Apple's iTunes could be very good for both companies as it would allow for new services that would be impossible for each company alone.
Facebook has become the faster growing UK online property, unique visitors for the service growing by 18 percent in August and nearing a total of 9 million. Now, reports are indicating that the company wants to take on MySpace and start offering an artistic music platform that will allow artists and labels to build web pages and supply widgets for music promotion, gig scheduling and more. While this service will feature the existing iLike service, it will also add iTunes widgets for listening to 30-second song samples and even purchasing tracks.
This would not be the first such partnership for Apple as the company has already teamed up with Bebo and Yahoo Japan on similar projects. Besides these partnerships, Apple is also offering web widgets to anyone that wants them, these can be added to just about any web site and will provide information about the users' music preferences and also a very quick way to tie into the iTuens store. These new ways of letting people work with the content as well as the iTunes WiFi store will go a long way to making Apple's service even more popular. Besides these web-based services, the company is expanding iTunes in other ways, with the recent HD radio tagging feature that allows users to mark songs they find interesting and look them up later to get more information or even purchase them.
This potential partnership with Facebook will only serve to further cement Apple's position in the digital music space and allow them to easily reach even more people than they currently do.