Facebook’s Impact on Music Services: 1.5 Billion Shares in Six Weeks

The integrations with music services that Facebook unveiled at its f8 developers conference in September were expected to boost consumer adoption and usage. Judging by the numbers Facebook released Tuesday, that’s exactly what has happened.

In the two months since f8, Facebook users have shared – often involuntarily – their listening activity more than 1.5 billion times using the services that integrated with Facebook’s Open Graph, according to a post at Facebook Developers blog.

Spotify appears to be the biggest beneficiary of Facebook’s involvement with music services. Facebook says Spotify has added “well over 4 million” new users since f8. AppData currently puts Spotify at 2.5 million daily average users (DAU) and 7.4 million monthly average users (MAU). Those figures reflect only activity through Spotify’s integration with Facebook and are probably much higher. Since f8, new Spotify users could register only through Facebook Connect. But before f8 Spotify already had about 10 million registered users who may or may not have linked their Spotify and Facebook accounts.

Competing subscription services have got a bump, too. Mog has experienced 246-percent growth in Facebook users since f8. Rdio’s new registrations through Facebook are up by a factor of 30. It’s important to note that both have only more recently made a bigger push to register new users through Facebook Connect, meaning their Facebook users don’t accurately reflect total usage. (Mog launched in December 2009 and Rdio launched in June 2010.) AppData, which tracks usage of Facebook apps, currently puts Mog at 10,000 DAU/170,000 MAU and Rdio at 6,000 DAU/60,000 MAU.

Deezer, a subscription service based in France, is said to have gained 10,000 users per day since integrating with Open Graph. AppData currently puts Deezer at 110,000 DAU/800,000 MAU. Deezer, currently available in France and the U.K., says it is planning to launch in 130 markets around the world – but not the U.S.

The blog post added that Slacker has seen its monthly active users increased 11-fold. It currently has 10,000 DAU/120,000 MAU, according to AppData. But the company has far more users who have not linked their accounts with Facebook. Slacker claimed to have 30 million registered users and 400,000 paying subscribers in a September article in the Los Angeles Times.

he across-the-board growth in adoption and activity should, at least for the time being, put to rest concerns that Facebook is creating a winner-take-all situation. Spotify has clearly received the biggest boost from working with Facebook. But other services are also benefitting from the integration. It may turn out that Facebook creates a rising tide that lifts all boats, but refusing to work closely with the social network can sink a music service.