In just four months, Facebook has become a major player in music streaming. Since the launch of Facebook Music in September, the social-networking giant has helped Spotify skyrocket to over 3 million users in the U.S. and significantly raise the profiles of services like Rdio and Mog. And with 5 billion songs shared on Facebook since September alone, the site’s data reveals a few trends that even SoundScan doesn’t always pick up.
“When we looked at the top 100 songs shared on Facebook, it was a lot of the same songs you would discover if you looked on a Billboard chart,” Facebook’s VP of partnerships Dan Rose told Billboard editorial director Bill Werde in a keynote Q&A Monday. “Some artists aren’t as famous globally but have local artists with pockets of fans. One example is Skrillex. [He’s] not necessarily a top 10 artist, but two of [his] songs [were on our chart.] So that’s one of the really powerful things about this. It’s not just reinforcing the same songs everybody’s listening to, but enabling artists to be discovered in ways that were never possible before at scale.”
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Facebook is also a booming marketplace for apps, particularly in Europe, where the app economy helped create 232,000 jobs in 2011.
Casual-gaming companies like Zynga, Wooga, Playfish and King.com are among Facebook’s top developers worldwide. “At a time when everyone is talking about jobs, the companies I just mentioned are growing their companies and their employees by taking the categories they are in and making them social,” Rose said.
Dan Rose, Facebook’s VP of Partnerships (right) interviewed by Billboard Editorial Director Bill Werde at MIDEM’s Keynote Q&A session. (Photo: MIDEM/360 Medias/Image & Co)
(Photo: MIDEM/360 Medias/Image & Co)
