Phantom Maelstrom

Surprise? Most people on Facebook likes to listen to music and they are commonly sharing it with their friends. Music discovery services such as Spotify, Rdio, Mog, Slacker, and Earbits are attracting significantly more users since Facebook's f6 Developer's Conference.

Now that music apps are on the Open Graph — and appear in the ticker — Facebook users have shared their listening activity more than 1.5 billion times with their friends, according to Facebook's Casey Maloney Rosales Muller in a blog post published Tuesday. (see here)

"Developers have started to demonstrate that when music is discovered through friends, people listen to more music and a wider variety of artists," he writes. "Our hypothesis was that integrating with the Open Graph would accelerate music discovery and make it more valuable part of the Facebook experience, while improving key metrics for our partners."

Those key metrics indeed improved, with some music developers seeing active users on their services more than double.

The results were:

• Four million people have joined Spotify, a Swedish-founded, UK-headquartered DRM-based music streaming service offering streaming of selected music from a range of major and independent record labels, including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group, and Universal, since September 22. The service became available in the U.S. on July 14.
• MOG, a paid subscription online music service and blog network, where users can listen to, read about, and discover music, saw a 246% growth from Facebook users since f8.
• Rdio, an ad-free music subscription service available in the U.S., Canada, and Brazil, and is available as a website and also has clients for the iPhone, iPod Touch & iPad, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone mobile devices, which can play streaming music or cache songs for offline playback, saw an increase of user registrations 30-fold because of the influence of Facebook.
• Slacker, an interactive Internet radio service available in the US and Canada, where listeners can access the service on the web, through mobile apps on multiple smartphones as well as on the Slacker Personal Radio Players and other services, and allows users to create and share customized music stations, saw a more than 11x increase in monthly active users in the month following f8.
• Earbits, a commercial-free music streaming service and music marketing platform, also experienced a 1,350% increase in the number of users becoming fans of the band they're listening to.

Other integrated music sites include Rhapsody, Soundcloud, Vevo, Songza, iHeartRadio and AudioVroom.

Facebook is anticipating growth for its music partners to continue to increase after it rolls out Timeline to the masses. Only a limited amount of Facebook users have enabled Timeline for the official public launch.