Music service coming soon to Facebook?

A Techcrunch post on Tuesday titled “Mark Zuckerberg: “Spotify Is So Good”” caught my eye this week. Rumor has it that Facebook is in talks with Spotify. If Spotify becomes Facebook’s music service either by acquisition or partnership, this will be very bad news for MySpace. This will be true even if MySpace closes on the acquisition of iLike, a very respectable and popular music service. Over 9 million current Facebook users have downloaded the iLike application. iLike has attracted 55 million total users, a number reported in a recent Financial Times article covering the MySpace iLike deal.

In March of this year I posted a comparison of Radiohead Facebook vs Myspace fans titled “962,631 Facebook fans vs 199,240 Myspace friends“. Since then, in less than 6 months, the numbers have grown to 1,202,643 Facebook fans vs 237,601 MySpace fans (as of today). While both have grown, Radiohead’s Facebook fan numbers are up roughly 25% compared to Radiohead’s MySpace friends up 19%. To put it in perspective, Radiohead added 240,000 fans on Facebook since March 09. This number of new Radiohead fans on Facebook since March exceeds Radiohead’s total number of Myspace friends acquired since Myspace’s inception.

I still go to MySpace often to check out songs from new artists I’ve discovered or check out the new songs from artists I like. However, that’s mostly the only reason I go to MySpace since I’m really not into online games, another of MySpace’s strengths. Like many users, I find Facebook’s cleaner interface, “not in you face” advertisements (they are there, but not distracting), and social networking value to be far superior to MySpace’s offering. I do not currently go to Facebook to check out new artists songs although I will occasionally link to a YouTube video of an artist I particularly like on my wall. When Facebook adds a music player service, that will likely mean fewer visits to MySpace. With the rumors about Spotify and Facebook surfacing, it looks like this day is coming.

What would I do if I were the CEO of MySpace looking to stave off a death spiral? I have some ideas, but that is a topic for another day’s blog post.  Purchasing iLike may have been a good move for MySpace, but it probably is not enough given that whomever Facebook chooses for a competing service, whether it be Spotify or any one of many other music service startups out there, their choice will immediately become a “de facto” music service leader.

Watching videos together with videowave gadget on Google Wave

In my previous post I speculated that Google Wave will allow new possibilities in how we share and experience music together. This also changes how artists/bands can potentially interact with their fans.  Last weekend I attended GTUG Campout: Silicon Valley (Google Technology User Group) which centered around developing gadgets and robots in wave. There were many interesting and inspirational development efforts at this weekend hackathon where the focus was to complete the development of a Google Wave gadget or robot in a single weekend (starting at 9 PM Friday and finishing by 4PM on Sunday). After the demonstrations by each of the teams that finished, during dinner, all participants were invited to vote on the applications presented to pick some winners. The 1st place winner was a Wave gadget  called “Videowave”, created by Sol Wu, Aaron Tong, and Nelson To.

The Videowave gadget allows real time video sharing and commenting in Wave.  So how does this work and how does it translate to social media and music? You can start a wave that contains the videowave gadget and load a YouTube video.  Say for example, you and your friends are big fans of Britney Spears or the Jonas Brothers and you are the 1st one to notice that a new Britney or Jonas Brothers video has been uploaded to YouTube. Being huge fans, you will of coarse want to share this with your friends. With Google Wave and the videowave gadget, you can invite your friends to watch the video together, all watching the video play at the same time and all able to chat and comment about what’s happening in the video, lyrics, dance moves, favorite parts etc. As you all chat, it’s all in real time with text everyone is typing appearing as it is typed.  Since the YouTube video is new and more of your friends are joining the Wave, you’ll probably want to watch it a few more times.

At this time, Google Wave is only available to those who’ve applied for and received wave sandbox developer accounts.  You can “sign up” now to hear more about Google Wave.  It’s probably a good idea to get on the list now as I doubt Google will turn it on for 50 million new users simultaneously.