Excuse the pun, but on the face of it there is no contest between Facebook and MySpace's
respective music platforms. Facebook's
penetration into our lives in the past year doesn't mask the fact that Myspace not only growing faster than Facebook with 300,000 new users a day compared to Facebook's 100,000 but it dwarves it is younger rival's total user tally by almost five to one. But MySpace is still hindered by an unwieldy user interface, even following the recent revamp, compared to the relatively straightforward and visually impressive Facebook. This, allied to Facebook's commercially astute decision to open up the site to third-party applications, is reason enough to suspect that if rumors of a soon-to-be-released competitor for iTunes
are true then those earlier figures could swing in Mr Zuckenberg's direction.
Currently Myspace still has the ace of spades with its instant music player that automatically plays music when you go to an artist's site. This is of huge advantage for bands, allowing them far greater exposure to potential new fans than in Facebook. It also has added credibility because of its size; the potential to connect with more bands and fans, in spite of the dated design, is a big draw. At the moment iLike, the most popular application on Facebook, is the best way for a band to communicate with their fans etc.. Musicians can upload songs, send multimedia messages via iCast and receive weekly stats updates about their fan-base. For the listener, Facebook offers the highly-addictive iLike music challenge, lots of applications that synchronize with your music player and an application that gives you information on concerts from your favorite bands. The success of the latter though depends on how many artists you include in your profile. Myspace shares similar functions with Facebook, crucially though it has such a wide range of music that it is difficult to see how Facebook's ambitions in this area can be achieved. It is claimed by those in the know that negotiations have begun with record labels to try to take on iTunes and Myspace, because if Facebook could be on to a winner if it combined the access to major artists with a more user-friendly way of downloading content than Myspace. The holy grail though for Facebook is to develop a technology where users can buy music which is accessible anywhere and that will synchronism with your own computer and store music locally. The key to this development is that there would be a seamless transition between being online and offline, they've already bought the company who are developing this technology (Parakey). The implications of such a development are too great to detail here, suffice to say though that the relevance of Myspace would evaporate if Facebook were to implement this. For now, they're the market leaders and provide the best service for bands if not for listeners, big changes could be on the way though.
