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.
