How Facebook’s “Listen With” Button Can Help You Promote Your Music

Just How Good Is Facebook's "Listen With" Button For Musicians?

You’re a musician, you’ve read about Facebook’s new “Listen With” button, and you’re wondering exactly how this new feature can help you spread your music. OK, bear with me…

As you know by now, the “Listen With” button lets your friends listen to  the songs you’re playing while you’re online. Well, I want to call your attention to how friends interact with these songs.

Each time a friend clicks on the “Listen With” button, the chat room that’s opened for your friend to talk with you will also display a link back to the artist’s Facebook Page. So, checking out that artist’s profile becomes as easy as 1-2-3. No need to hunt for information all over the Internet.

From a marketing point of view, I don’t have to tell you how cool this is. If you’re the artist at the center of it all, the “Listen With” button can make people who’s never heard of you before head down to your profile, and go through your bio, your songs and your merchandise. They’ll even get to buy tickets for upcoming shows. Everything will be just one click away.

This is the first time since Facebook launched it’s music partnerships that the company does something which lets artists gain fans so easily. Seen in this light, Facebook’s alliance with Spotify was just the beginning of an unparalleled incursion in the music scene. Is 2012 going to be the year in which music goes truly social? With the evidence we have at hand, a case can certainly be made.

Facebook’s New Button Lets You Listen To Music With Your Friends

Now You Can Listen To Music With Up To 50 Facebook Friends At The Same Time

Facebook began rolling its “Listen With” button last week, and the response has been unanimous. It rocks.

In a nutshell, what this button does is to let you listen to music with as many as 50 different friends at the very same time. When this button is activated, friends can see a music note icon next to your name in chat. This means that you’re listening to a song, and by clicking on the button they can listen to it with you in real time. The button also opens a chat room for you and your friend, and posts a story to your news feed that goes along the lines of “Peter is listening to music with Stephen.”

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that this new service is dealing a tremendous blow to Turntable.fm. Up until now, that was the one service you had to use for synchronous listening with friends. Well, now that Facebook is playing in that ballpark Turntable.fm will have to think of something different to survive. Concentrating on its music discovery capabilities by fostering public listening rooms and sessions with celebrity DJs could be a good move.

But not that it could do a lot more now that its users have been entinced by a more widely-adopted service such as Facebook, really. It’s the one card left for it to play.