I’ve been fascinated with Spotify’s partnership with Facebook ever since the announcement. It’s a super smart move by Spotify to gain access to the largest social network and let’s be honest who doesn’t like music?!
When friends listen to music on Spotify the posts pop up in your Facebook timeline. Which is pretty cool, right? It’s pretty much the ultimate recommendation engine! So what of services like Last.fm?
Previously, I have talked about the future of social networks for music. Whilst this new partnership is not enabling artists to participate, it is bringing recommendations and streaming together within a social context.
Spotify on Facebook
Playing around with the “new” Facebook timeline profiles, you will find the music tab has been completely revamped. The interesting thing for me is this bit of functionality is neatly tucked away and most people will never realise its there.
They are recording all the music you listen to (on Spotify) to use that data as a music recommendation service back in Spotify. It currently displays:
- Top Songs
- Top Albums
- Top Playlists
- Top Artists
- How many songs you’ve played
The best thing about this functionality is that you can see an overview of your music over the months and years (supposing that Facebook doesn’t change beyond recognition in the meantime).
The only thing it is lacking for me is a dashboard/notification to tell you about all the new artists that you might love based on your listening preferences.
One other benefit of Facebook having this data from Spotify is that when you visit a band page – (which is way more likely if you see your friends have just listened to them). It now tells you their best songs according to your friends!
Facebook are using the power of recommendation to fuel discovering new music, an important part of Spotify’s model is to encourage people to listen to a wider range of music than they would normally.
Facebook on Spotify…
Spotify have introduced a new interface, with a plethora of new features to match the new functionality embedded within Facebook. (Whilst I won’t cover the new Spotify features here, I may do in future).
The most obvious new change to Spotify is when you first log in that recommendations on the home screen are now personalised – a massive step in making the service more inviting for users to discover new music.
As Spotify hasn’t killed Last.fm (yet), you might want to use service Spotilast to generates personalised Spotify playlists based on the artists suggested to you by Last.fm.
So tell me;
- Have you connected Spotify to Facebook?
- Has Spotify & Facebook changed the way you find new music?
- Do you find your friends music habits annoying, cluttering your timeline?
- Or, are you welcoming loads of new music into your life?
