It’s not the first time Facebook and Spotify have been uttered in the same sentence, and if Gigaom‘s hearing right, it’s probably not the last. Come August, Facebook’s rumoured to announce a Spotify-streaming deal at its annual developer conference, f8.
While Spotify users can already connect with Facebook friends on the desktop program, mining their playlists for inspiration or sharing songs on their Facebook pages, Zuckerberg and co are said to want a much deeper relationship with Spotify, plus several other unnamed music services.
Gigaom has spoken to some of those unnamed music services and found out the following details:
In the left-hand column, right where Facebook lists Photos, Friends, Places, Groups, Deals, Pages, and Games, you will find a new tab called Music. This tab will show up if a user has listened to music with one of Facebook’s partner music services.
Clicking on this new tab will open a page called Music Dashboard.
The Persistent Playback/Pause Button at the bottom of the Facebook page, where currently you have the chat icon. This button essentially is like a quick snapshot and controller of the music experience. Mouse over it and you can see what is playing on whatever service you might be logged into using Facebook Connect. It also allows you to play or pause a track once you discover it on Facebook. It is also linked to the play buttons in the news feed.
A page with snapshot of all the songs you have listened to on any specific service and also your top tracks and the number of times you have listened to those tracks.
The Music Dashboard will have the following features:
Music Notifications: here you have notifications that show if your friends have listened to songs recommended by you or on your profile.
Recommended Songs: You can get a list of songs heard and recommended by your friends. You can also play them back by clicking the play icon.
Top Songs from friends.
Top Albums from friends, with cover art.
Recent listens from your friends.
In the upper-right corner there will be a “happening now” ticker that shows what is happening in your social and musical universe, including songs that your friends are playing. There is some talk that this “Happening Now ticker” would show-up all throughout your music experience and not just on the music dashboard.
With a US launch now looking very possible for Spotify since they signed up Universal Music, it’s expected to launch sometime this (northern) summer – giving Facebook just enough time to roll the new service out while everyone’s still going crazy for the summer pop-ditties. The only question is which other music services Facebook has tapped – Soundcloud? Pandora? iTunes? [Gigaom]