In order to show – and monetise – official music videos, Facebook will need a licence similar to the one YouTube has with various labels. Facebook has been reportedly looking forward to get into the music business, and not it is not taking over Spotify.
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Now though, a spokesperson for Facebook has denied the rumours, telling Billboard the company has “no plans to go into music streaming”. Specifically, it seems to want to put music videos in users’ News Feed, and has already had talks with a number of music labels, according to the New York Times, which spoke to several anonymous sources. But with the social media site looking to make its own foray into the audio streaming game, does Mark Zuckerberg stand to lose another friend?
More news suggests that Facebook is giving these record labels the authority to select which videos should appear on the news feed, and in return, the social networking company will share revenue from advertisements that are said to appear on the side of each video. “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”, said one unnamed source, speaking to Music Ally.
Facebook is talking with music labels, but why?
The new reports are a little different from what was being said earlier.
Most probably Facebook will let the artists to initiate gathering royalties each time when their music videos were played by their fans on Facebook.
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“But this video content could actually drive people back to Facebook proper”. Facebook has urged publishers like CNN, Buzzfeed and ESPN to publish original videos to the News Feed, allowing them to post them on YouTube and Vimeo, which then gets linked back to Facebook. So far, its strategy seems to be working: Facebook had an estimated 315 billion video views in the first quarter of 2015, according to Ampere Analysis, an independent video analytics firm. Universal and Sony share music videos and other content online using Vevo, their joint venture with Google and Abu Dhabi Media, which is accessible on YouTube and other platforms.
