What Facebook's Social Music Service Will Probably Look Like

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Facebook will most likely launch its music service at today at the f8 conference. It will probably have something to do with Spotify. The social media company penned a deal with the music service earlier this year and Spotify CEO Daniel Ek will speak at the conference. And it looks like it will look less like a direct streaming music service and more like a platform that enhances the experience. But other than that Facebook has kept its secret service in the dark. That doesn't mean we don't have some ideas of what will make the service worth using. Things slip.

Social listening. By accident (or maybe not?) Facebook creative director Ji Lee tweeted: "The 'Listen with your friend' feature in ticker is blowing my mind. Listen to what your friends are listening." He took the tweet down within minutes, reports TechCrunch's MG Siegler, but not before former Sony Music employee Mitchell  Holder snagged a screen shot of the tweet. (Lee probably knew that one of his 5,173 followers was going to do that....) Lee revealed in his tweet that you can likely see what you're friends are jamming out to and join in on the music. That could facilitate some pretty rad (or sad?) cyber dance parties.

We can think of one annoying catch: Say your friend is a premium Spotify subscriber, and you're too cheap for that, can you still listen to the same songs? Probably not. Annoying for you, smart of Spotify, who might hook new paying subscribers that way.

Ticker integration. To make it easy to see others' music selections they will appear in the ticker, which Facebook conveniently launched a few days before its music announcement, The Guardian reports. "Facebook's 750 million users will be able to automatically share activity such as viewing, listening and reading in the live "ticker" stream, once they have opted in to the feature," making it a lot easier for you to discover and share music (or music services) with your friends.

Status updates, but of course. Beyond ticker updates, it looks like Facebook music will seamlessly integrate with status updates, a hallmark of Facebookism. TechCrunch also caught Lee's Facebook status: Ji Lee is listening to Black & Blue by Mike Snow and feeling happy it’s another beautiful sunny day in California. 

Not exactly a one stop shop. Earlier plans made it look like you'd never have to leave the land of profiles and tagged photos while listening to music, but AllThingsD's Peter Kafka reports that "multiple sources," say "those plans have been scrapped in recent week." Huge bummer. Now, when a users clicks a song update, Facebook will open up a separate Spotify (or, whatever) page prompting the user to sign in, after which they'll have to use Spotify's player. Kind of crappy for user experience; full integration would make the service much more appealing.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.