Facebook Integration Leads to Huge Gains for Subscription Music Services

This past September, Facebook unveiled at its f8 developer's conference its new agreements with music services to allow them to integrate their offerings with Facebook, thus dramatically raising their Internet presence in one quick move. Now, the Hollywood Reporter is reporting that virtually all such music service providers that have taken Facebook up on its offer have seen a dramatic uptick in subscriptions as a result of their newfound presence on Facebook. In addition, Facebook announced that the new agreements have led to 1.5 billion listening activity shares.

Music subscription services offer an alternative to purchasing music via downloading from such sites as the Apple Store. Instead of downloading, songs are streamed live, thus they never actually reside on the user's computer. The model is comparative to listening to radio programing versus buying a CD. The downside is that users must endure advertising between songs.

Of those integrating their services with Facebook, Spotify seems to have received the biggest bump, with over four million new subscriptions since the change, mostly attributable to users getting on via Facebook. The company hasn't yet spoken about whether all those new subscriptions have turned into increased sales of advertisements on its site, but that's to be expected seeing as how it's only been two months since the Facebook connection went live.

Meanwhile, other subscription survives have been benefiting as well. Mog has reported an increase of 246 percent, and Rido says it seen a spike of 36 percent. The numbers for both are not reflective of the actual bump however as both took longer to get their connections going then did Spotify, thus, they have some catching up to do.

Other sits overseas have benefited as well. Company execs at Deezer, the French music service reported seeing a jump of 10,000 users in a single day.

The increase in music subscriptions has had a bleed-over effect into other areas, the blog post site Slacker for instance has seen its hits jump eleven-fold since it began blogging about Facebook music subscription tie in's with Facebook, most notably, Spotify.

It's also become a hotly debated topic as many users find the sharing that goes on with such sites through the new Facebook interface, seems to happen without their agreeing to it, which some see as an invasion of their privacy.

As it stands now, it seems that linking with Facebook has become de riguer for subscription music services if they hope to survive in the increasingly popular music subscription arena.