Will Facebook respond to Google’s Oct 28 Music announcement?

I saw on Techcrunch that Google will launch a music service on October 28th that combines some services from Lala and iLike  (no details yet …).

Screenshots

Some suggested listening on Lala while you read on.

I’ve previously posted an article on Lala titled ‘10 cents a song is pretty tempting‘ . Now if Google turns that into billions of songs, this adds up to real money.  So while no details are available yet, if I were to guess, I like Lala’s player and 10 cents per song online price for purchasing rights to internet plays.  I like iLikes ticketing/concert information. All they need now is a great recommendation engine like Last.fm or Pandora (I slightly prefer Last.fm), but then Google likely has the talent in house to develop a great recommendation engine. The hard part of starting from scratch would be doing the licensing deals. Lala and iLike have that.

So will Facebook respond ? I would be very surprised if Facebook does not announce something (at least an intention) either prior to or within a week of Google’s October 28 roll out. There were rumors just a few weeks ago that Mark Zuckerberg likes Spotify . I was unable to check that music service out as it is not available in the US … probably licensing … the hard part.

If both Google and Facebook partner up with just a few of the multitude of music players out there, there will likely be some other music services that just end up fading away.  One thing is certain. Most people are pretty attached to their music. An awesome music service coupled with broad music licensing can make for some very loyal customers, perhaps even loyal enough to follow their preference with a compatible phone service.

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.