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For your Spotifying pleasure...

Posted: Tuesday 15 November, 2011

George Guildford

The music industry has certainly seen more than its fair share of major changes recently. First came the dawn of the mp3 player and the growth to superstardom of music sharing service, Napster - then came social networking platforms YouTube and MySpace and more recently Facebook and Twitter. In fact, making the most of the digital age has been something that artists and labels have been trying to embrace for the best part of ten years now - some seeing more success than others of course (from Clap Your Hands Say Go releasing their debut album all on their own, to the Arctic Monkeys sold out shows without a label or radio play, to Lil Wayne's 32 million Facebook fans and Radiohead's 'name your price' album download options). In fact, I would go as far as to say that the music industry is a pretty exciting place to be right now - especially given that the ever-increasing growth of music sharing trends only continues to take the focus further and further away from the old model of record deals and radio play.

 

However, with Facebook's recent F8 announcements, the question on everyone's lips at the moment is just how much of an impact the latest Spotify integration will have on the way we listen to and share music over the coming months and years. What are the opportunities it presents to new and emerging artists as well as high profile labels and artists? Whilst it is far too early to tell at this point as to whether Spotify will go on to reach the levels of influence that MySpace saw way back when, it is certainly something that artists, labels, publishers and pluggers have all rapidly started to focus a lot of attention on.

Simply put, the current integration between Spotify and Facebook enables users to listen to their favourite tracks on Spotify, automatically share what they are listening to on their Facebook wall as well as create, share and post their own playists and mixtapes with friends across Facebook and Spotify. Since integrating with Facebook, Spotify has already seen users increase by more than 4 million users, with over 1.5 billion tracks having been shared by music lovers in just a matter of months.

From a user perspective, I've been a fan of both Soundcloud and Bandcamp for over a year now as their focus on new and emerging artists has enabled me to stumble across some incredible new artists that would normally have been given little or no visibility elsewhere. My choice of both Soundcloud and Bandcamp over Spotify was always due to the lack of new artists that I could find when visiting the site in the past. However, this has changed significantly over the last few months. Searching for the likes of Harlem, Real Estate, Star Slinger or Kurt Vile (some of this year's best new artists) was previously something that would always draw a blank when searching on Spotify. Equally so was the lack of brand new albums by more well known artists. Both scenarios, it is safe to say, have quickly changed. 

Today is the launch of the long awaited Drake album 'Take Care' - already available to stream on Spotify on the day of release. In fact, the reason I knew this was because I saw the album was being listened to by one of my friends on Facebook. Naturally, I checked the album out on spotify and naturally downloaded it from iTunes soon after. Would I have bought this without listening to it first? Probably not. Would the process of not knowing the album was even available yet, through to actually purchasing it have been so quick had I not seen this via the integration of Spotify on my Facebook wall? Definitely not. Will Spotify's integration into Facebook change the way we experience new music forever? hmmmm... now there's a question.