![]() In many respects music has taken a series of retrograde steps socially speaking since the days of imeem, MySpace and Last.FM. ![]() The currently announced features just scratch the surface of what Facebook can do. Expect a true Musical.ly ‘killer’ sometime within the next nine months.įacebook is not here to compete with Spotify, but it is here to compete with YouTube and Snapchat and to steal some of the clothes of Musical.ly and co. Betraying Facebook’s strategic imperative of building its Live business. Not a Musical.ly killer, at least not yetĪlthough some have been quick to liken Facebook’s lip sync functionality to Musical.ly and co, in reality it is not competing head on with those apps because it is initially launched as a Facebook Live feature. Hence the focus of music to drive usage back to its core platform where it can generate more ad revenue. ![]() But that shift of user time to under monetized ad platforms threatens Facebook’s ad revenue growth. It is now the world’s leading messaging app company, with only Chinese companies truly challenging it (South Koreas’ Kakao Corp, Japan’s Line and Chinese players excepted). It realised that the future of social was in messaging apps not traditional social networks. By going all in with its messaging app strategy Facebook took a brave move few big companies do: it decided to disrupt itself before someone else did. This hints at a degree of strategic wobbles in Facebook towers. There’s no mention of Instagram (surely the best outlet for this kind of functionality). Is Facebook bottling it when it comes to messaging apps?įor the moment, Facebook’s strategy is squarely focussed around its core platform. The music industry so needs this right now. Now it has got a serious challenger that just upped the ante beyond comments, mash ups and likes / dislikes. YouTube is the only other scale player that really brings a truly social element to streaming. Even though Facebook has all the ingredients to do what those guys did, but at scale, it is far too big to try to get away with that strategy so had to get licenses in place first. These apps were small enough to be able to do first and ask forgiveness later. Apps like Dubsmash and Musical.ly showed that it doesn’t have to be that way. In short, the fun has been taken out of music. YouTube now has a social music competitor worthy of noteįor a whole host of reasons which warrant a blog post of their own, streaming music has coalesced around a very functional value proposition. (MIDiA subscribers – check out our forthcoming inaugural ‘Tech Majors Quarterly Market Shares’ report to see how Facebook’s content strategy stacks up against Apple, Alphabet and Amazon, and where it will be heading.) Facebook may be embarking on a content strategy like the other tech majors, but unlike Apple and Amazon, its core focus will be ad supported, not premium. Streaming music is a low margin business that is being competed over by a number of very well established heavyweights. Not only is it the wrong fit, it simply doesn’t need to. Let me rephrase that, just in case anyone in Facebook’s management team is getting tempted to – wrongly – make the wrong move – Facebook should never try be a Spotify clone. It’s not about subscriptions, nor should it beįacebook was never going to try be a Spotify clone.
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