By James Cridland – Podnews
First look: Spotify and Facebook are introducing a new miniplayer experience that allows listeners to enjoy music and podcasts from Spotify directly within Facebook on iOS and Android, without switching between apps.
Driven by social discovery, Spotify say that the miniplayer experience will improve how users share and engage with songs and podcast episodes–all without having to leave the Facebook app.
Spotify Premium users can access full playback directly from Spotify while Free users can enjoy the same experience via shuffle mode and accompanying ads from Spotify.
Facebook has 3 billion users worldwide and more than 100 billion messages are shared every day.
How to share a podcast episode
On your Android or iOS phone:
- Go to Spotify, and find the episode you want to share
- Press the ‘share’ icon
- Choose “Facebook News Feed” or “Facebook Stories”
- Finish writing your post, and you’re done.
For music, people will also have the ability to play songs via the miniplayer experience through verified artists posts. It’ll also appear within user uploaded videos on Facebook that contain licensed music.
How to listen
On your Android or iOS phone:
- Tap play on the song or podcast episode you, your friend, family member, or favourite creator shared from Spotify to their Facebook News Feed
- The first time you’re using the player, you’ll see a consent dialog open, click on Connect to continue.
- If you’re logged in to Spotify, the apps will automatically switch and playback will start from within the Spotify app. (If you’re not logged in, you will be prompted to do so.)
- Spotify keeps playing even if you keep scrolling down your Facebook News Feed, but you’ll have control over playback options so you can pause or dismiss the miniplayer.
When we asked about the Spotify embedded web player, we were told that if a user isn’t logged in, the stream won’t be logged in Spotify for Podcasters. However, the information Spotify gives us here seems to suggest that all podcast plays within Facebook will be logged in.
Where it’s available
The new integration is rolling out in 27 markets – Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, South Africa, Thailand, Uruguay, and USA.
Additional markets will follow in the coming month.
We’d note that no European countries are included, and wonder if there’s a GDPR issue to solve for the companies.
Here’s more from Spotify’s For The Record blog.
Read more here.
Integrating social media, Facebook with podcast/media facilitator, Spotify means more intelligence will be generated by consumers in the Facebook and Spotify universe who will know what kinds of media such as spoken word and music genre will be consumed.
In light of producers of social media content hosted by Facebook, won't the same occur with Spotify's a/v material?
Given that not all podcasters are permanently online for various reasons including burnout and/or lack of audience numbers, one wonders how the consumer will be targeted for advertising.
It is likely that the information collected by Facebook and Spotify is a 'minefield' of consumer's tastes such that machine learning algorithms will be able to predict what the consumers preferences are despite the consumer's tastes for sporadic podcasters.
Then you have to ask "...why stop collecting information on Spotify consumption..."?
Consequently, the Facebook universe may well want to integrate how we consume goods and services such as those by ebay and Amazon.
Whether the distribution of goods and services will be disparate as in ebay vendors or centralized such as Amazon's fulfillment centres is yet to be seen.
Thank you,
Anthony of exciting, dynamic, thinking and thoughtful, Belfield