Why Facebook’s First Foray Into Music Should Be Extremely Exciting For The Music Industry
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People may think music is already ubiquitous in our lives but Facebook’s recent announcement illustrates that we’re only at the beginning stages of truly implementing music into our everyday lives and interactions.
In a blog post yesterday, Facebook’s Tamara Hrivnak, Head of Music Business Development & Partnerships and Fred Beteille, Head of Product, Music & Rights, announced that Facebook will be rolling out “[…] new ways for people to express themselves with music in their posts, including a new feature, Lip Sync Live.”
There are two main features that were announced: the use of music in videos, and Lip Sync Live.
The Use of Music in Videos
Facebook will slowly roll out the ability for anyone to include music in their videos. Since the announcement of Facebook Watch last summer, Facebook has dug deeper into video content. Yet, YouTube still seems dominant among most users. The ability for anyone to include music in their videos gives Facebook a huge competitive advantage. People get frustrated when they upload a homemade video to YouTube but can’t put their favourite song in it due to YouTube’s Content ID system. Facebook now allows one to do so.
With the abundance of video content being created (300 hrs of video content is uploaded to YouTube every minute!), enabling the use of music in videos is a win for Facebook, Facebook users, and music rightsholders.
Lip Sync Live
The second feature Facebook will roll out is called “Lip Sync Live,” which enables users to lip sync to songs when they go live; as described in the blog post the new feature, “[…] lets you bring friends and family into spontaneous musical moments.” Furthermore, when broadcasting with Lip Sync Live, friends tuned in will be able to see the artist, song, and can simply tap to follow the artist on Facebook.
This can become a valuable marketing play for artists — imagine influencers going live, lip-syncing to a song, and getting all of their followers to simply tap a button to like the artists’ page. Better yet, imagine the biggest artists in the world lip-syncing their songs with millions of fans across the world in realtime.
What This Means for the Music Industry
The blog post ends with, “We’re exploring more ways to bring music to Facebook. In the coming months, we’ll start testing options for adding the music you love to Facebook Stories.”
I couldn’t be more excited to see what they come up with.
This is another step to music becoming truly ubiquitous. Videos, text messages, pictures, voice, Live Videos, 360 Videos, while you’re walking, running, talking, listening , in the home, in the car — music will be everywhere, and I think that’s pretty amazing.
During the days of vinyl and CDs, music was too expensive nor was the technology in place for it to become such an essential aspect of our lives. However, as those working in the music industry know all too well, the price of music has exponentially declined since the days of CDs.
Some will complain and say music is worth more; others will see opportunity. With a decrease in price, comes an increase in accessibility and demand.
Facebook has over 2bn users — we’re talking about taking a product and suddenly enabling over 2bn people worldwide to use it. And let’s not forget that Facebook has under its umbrella Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp and will presumably continue to integrate music into those apps. Will rightsholders get paid less than pennies per use of their song? Presumably yes. But it’s not about the money; imagine you post a video of your most recent family vacation with a song in it, your friends see it, love the song, have never heard of the artist, dig deeper into the artist and end up becoming a fan and perhaps buying concert tickets.
Building off artist pages, tagging, liking, and sharing, these features continue to enable Facebook users to act as marketers for an artist.
Of course, it’s too early to tell if these features will catch on; however, if Music.ly and YouTube are any indication as to how people enjoy interacting with music, these features seem destined to become yet another way of interacting with music. And this is only the beginning.
