When people say that Facebook ‘passed’ on music or missed a golden opportunity, what they’re really saying is that Facebook passed on a specific type of music model.
That is, a MySpace Music-style approach that featured centralized artist pages, and a hub concept subsequently championed by startups like BandPage and FanRx.
This morning, an executive at Facebook shared these 2012, post-Open Graph music-related stats with us by email. The message was obvious: we never passed on music, thank you very much.
Since launching Open Graph last September, 62.6 million songs have been played 22 billion times. This is about 210,000 years’ worth of music. (this is songs played through music apps and shared to Facebook).
Music app stats:
Songza:
– The web and iOS music app presents curated playlists to people, based on day, time mood and activity.
– Facebook is their top driver of new users, and the number of daily active users signing in through Facebook has increased 10x over the last five months.
– Facebook-connected users listen an average of 20% longer than non-connected Facebook users.
Deezer (just did a panel w/ Facebook at Le Web):
– iOS, Android and web app to share favorite music and listening activity.
– 3x the amount of people using the app since integrating with Facebook
– Adding 50K new users per day
Spotify:
– After integrating with Open Graph, found that Facebook-connected users were more than twice as likely to become paying users.
8tracks:
– social internet radio app enables people to select play lists based on mood, genre or artist
– 8tracks users generate 4M Open Graph shares weekly, resulting in 65 million story impressions
– Facebook is one of their major sources of referral traffic
KKBOX:
– Taiwan-based iOS and Android app that enables people to share their listening activity with friends
– provides lyrics so people can sing along w/ their favorite tunes
– Over 50M actions are shared back to timeline each month
– Over 50% of new users sign in via Facebook
Saavn:
– Indian-based mobile and desktop app has experienced exponential growth
since launching in Dec. of last year
– Generated nearly 2.3B impressions
– Daily referral traffic from Facebook has grown 30x and monthly music
streams have grown by over 200%
SoundTracking:
– web and mobile app lets people share favorite songs by identifying music playing around them and enabling them to share the song w/ a photo, location and comment
– Monthly active users are up over 50% from last month
22 billion plays in over a year is impressive, until you figure Pandora had more plays than that in the last quarter alone. Then all of a sudden the world’s largest social network and all their partners combined does not sound so impressive.
Those Pandora stats are very impressive compared to Facebook’s numbers they released! Pandora murders the 1Billion users on FB with only 56 million people in the US. Also, I thought it was pretty interesting to see that FB has 63 million songs (not really having but their partners in aggregate across 1B people) vs Myspace’s catalog of 52 million songs. In short, consumption and catalog are not that impressive when you look at the numbers relative to Pandora and Myspace.
what about the number of wall plays of YouTube and SoundCloud embeds?
There are only 2 real interesting stats on this list – the rest are general observations of how music apps/services can be used on a massively popular social website – but don’t actually speak to the power of Facebook to do anything in music.
The relevant stats:
>Songza:
>- Facebook-connected users listen an average of 20% longer
>than non-connected Facebook users.
Interesting because it shows a difference in FB v non-FB use of a specific service, and may appear to show some value proposition for FB.
>Spotify:
>- After integrating with Open Graph, found that Facebook
>connected users were more than twice as likely to become
>paying users.
Interesting because again it appears to show a value proposition for integration with Facebook.
Everything else is just noise….