Will Facebook’s Music Stories feature lead to a streaming service?

Facebook signalled a return to music late last week with its new post feature Music Stories. It allows users to listen to, and share, 30-second previews of a song or album through either Apple Music or Spotify. If they want to, they can buy it through YouTube. 

The social network says that more services will be added to stream the 30-second previews and repackage them into the Facebook audio player. 

Time will tell how much music sales will be generated through this Facebook link. It gets 8 billion video views a day, with nearly 900 million people accessing it on their mobile devices daily. Music Stories is Facebook’s first association with music since its deep integration with Spotify in 2011. It will allow bands to promote their own fan pages. 

“We hope by making this experience better, artists will share more, friends will share and engage more and music will become a better part of the Facebook experience overall,” Facebook Director of Product Michael Cerda. 

Music Stories encourages Facebook users to stay longer on the network – and encourages them to post more content. In the past year, less content has been posted on the network. It’s not a problem for Facebook at the moment. But it could be down the track if there isn’t enough content to keep bringing people back. 

Let’s hope Music Stories doesn’t follow the ill-fated path of Twitter’s #Music service, which in October 2013 tapped Rdio and Spotify to allow its users to listen to music shared by their networks. Within six months, Twitter pulled the plug. 

The arrival of Music Stories has re-sparked speculation that this is just the first step towards a full blown Facebook streaming service.  

Facebook executives have been denying such a plan when news leaked out in July that they were in secret talks with record labels. They insisted that negotiations were only around videos. 

But few analysts are buying that. One said, “There’s no reason to think that Facebook’s music ambitions will stop at just 30-second previews.” 

Many believe Facebook is merely waiting until it irons out the kinks in its video monetisation scheme. 

A source suggested to the Music Ally site: “It’s a mass land grab. Facebook going into the video space was always going to be an enormous, ambitious land grab and no doubt something they’ve been planning for some time as the potential income from ad revenue will be incredible.” 

According to global industry association IFPI, 9% of digital revenues around the world came from ad-supported streams last year. 23% was from subscription streams. The number of paying subscribers worldwide grew by 46.4%. The 39% growth of subscription revenues made it the fastest growing revenue stream.