Facebook’s New Music Stories Bring Music Sharing to the Social Network
Facebook is getting into the music-sharing game with a new feature — called Music Stories — that lets you post clips of songs you’re listening to on the social network.
Yes, in addition to learning about your friends’ and family’s thoughts on last night’s episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, you’ll now be able to see and listen to their favorite Pitbull songs. *Shudder*
Read More: The Top 10 Things That You Should Know How to Do on Facebook
Here’s how it works. While you’re listening to a song on Spotify or Apple Music (the only services that currently support the feature), you press the Share option and copy the song’s link.
You then go to Facebook, paste the link into your status box, and click Post. Your song will immediately appear on your and your friends’ News Feeds. Unfortunately, the feature is only available with the iOS Facebook app for now.
The process is far from seamless, given that you have to manually jump from one app to the next and paste in the link to the song — but it’s a start.
Thankfully, songs in your News Feed won’t be set to autoplay, so you won’t have to listen to everyone’s songs as you scroll. Users will have to click on a song in your feed to play a short clip of it.
You don’t have to subscribe to either Spotify or Apple Music to listen to the music clips. But if you are a subscriber, you can easily add linked clips to your list of favorites.
Facebook says it’s working to support more music-streaming services beyond Spotify and Apple Music in the future.
This isn’t the first time Facebook and Spotify have teamed up. Spotify previously required you to sign up for the service via your Facebook account, and it would automatically post the songs you were listening to on the social network.
That whole thing went over about as well as a you’d expect, with users complaining that they didn’t want all of their friends knowing when they were listening to “Karma Chameleon.” Thankfully, the requirement was eventually dropped.
If you’ve got the Facebook app for iOS, you can check out the new music-sharing feature today. If you’re an Android user, you’ll just have to wait.
Email Daniel at dhowley@yahoo-inc.com; follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley or on Google+.
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