Is a Facebook Music service in the works?

Facebook might be taking on MySpace in the music game.

Ars Technica posted about a possible forthcoming Facebook music service, by way of rumors from the New York Post. MySpace has been known as a music portal for some time - just about any band with a following has a MySpace page. But Facebook has quickly become a photo storage site, with 10 billions images uploaded so far, although a vast majority of them are pictures of teenagers making funny faces.

Hype around social networking apps has died down a bit, and the new wave seems to be in adding commercial benefits to users. Someday, your Facebook account may hold not only all of your photos, but your movies (streamed to your HDTV) and music. That's the idea MySpace is going with, even as it tries to figure out how it all works.

For Facebook, this is partly a debate over licensing directly versus partnering with a company such as iLike or Apple who have already worked out licensing deals.

I like the idea of an Apple partnership. There were rumors flying a few weeks ago about how Apple might start an all-you-can-eat streaming service similar to Rhapsody, but what better way to launch such a service than to hook up with Facebook? It would be an amazing sales generator for iTunes (if you want to buy your favorite Facebook tune, buy it from iTunes!) and a way for Facebook to gain quick music cred.

Facebook also has a huge opportunity to show MySpace how this can be done. Today, Facebook is a much more streamlined user experience. If music worked as seamlessly with the service as photos, users would quickly jump on the bandwagon. And, if they get hooked, it's possible that millions of people would start thinking of Facebook as more than a glorified blog and view it as a legitimate digital empire.

I imagine one of the major hurdles to all of this is still licensing, even if Apple, Real, and others have supposedly figured it out. It's one thing to stream over Rhapsody, but quite another to stream over Facebook. That's why the Real service only supports a few MP3 players, and not the iPod. It's not like the music labels have given Apple and Real an open contract to re-distribute music any way they see fit.

MySpace is in a different position: they want to be a music label. They will fail at this goal. Music buyers like me don't think of a social networking site as a label - as in, fire up your MySpace account to find the next hotshot Brit rock band.

It also hurts MySpace that they are viewed as a temporal streaming service, not as a place to actually store music. It makes the site much less sticky. In a year, it will be interesting to see what Facebook can become - I predict, they will focus on more permanent content.