Spotify's partnership with Facebook was announced yesterday at F8. Ek, writing in a company blog, explained why Facebook integration was a natural for the service. "We knew that the service had to be free to draw people away from piracy," he wrote. "To do that, we also knew that the service would have to be inherently social. There couldn’t be a better place to do this than Facebook."
What Facebook users will start seeing in their news feeds are Spotify music posts from their friends. Click on the post, and a song will play. Other Spotify Facebook features include a music dashboard and a real-time ticker to see the trending music tastes of your Facebook buddies.
There are some questions, though, about just how integrated Spotify is with Facebook. PCWorld's Mark Sullivan made this observation after viewing a one-on-one demo of Spotify working within Facebook: "When the Facebook guy giving the demo clicked on a song that one of his friends was listening to on Spotify ... the desktop Spotify app popped up to play the music."
"He told me," Sullivan continued, "that there is no 'canvas app' for Spotify, which, he explained, means that there’s no Spotify app that runs entirely inside Facebook, as Farmville [does]. That means you have to have both the Spotify desktop app and Facebook running to achieve the cool music sharing/syncing tricks shown at F8 today."
In his blog post, Ek suggested that bringing Spotify to Facebook could revive the music industry. "Social discovery on Facebook means that we’re bringing people back to paying for music again," he wrote. "And that's how the brilliant artists who create this music can continue creating it for us to enjoy."