Digital

Facebook adds Listen button to artist pages

By | Published on Wednesday 18 April 2012

Facebook

Facebook has added a Listen button to official artist pages on the social network, possibly to compensate for having screwed up every musician’s Facebook presence by forcing timeline as the default landing page, relegating any carefully constructed content, fan engagement or sell-through apps.

The new Listen button will look for the chosen artist on one of the social network’s streaming music partner’s platforms, so over here that’s primarily Spotify, though for users in the US Rdio and MOG are also available (though, for reasons not clear, not Rhapsody at the moment).

Audio has never been as prominent a part of Facebook’s artist pages as it was on MySpace, where most acts originally had their social media presence, though music files could be posted for a time via Facebook’s now defunct MP3 widget, and many artists used third party streaming tools or direct-to-fan plug-ins to offer streams or downloads.

Of course integrating with the likes of Spotify on audio means that artists earn a royalty if fans play their music, which self-managed streams do not, and also means that any publishing royalties are covered (which they often aren’t if artists or labels post streams on their own sites of social media). Though some might prefer to have more control over the audio they make available to users of the social network.

Quite what the user experience is like will depend on the streaming platform utilised. For me, when I clicked ‘Listen’ on Take That’s page, Spotify tried to install twice, eventually recognised I was already a user, shut down and opened up, shut down and opened up, asked for a password, tried to make me share my listening data with the social network four times, and then presented Take That’s discography on the streaming platform. Now that’s frictionless.



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