What's the frequency, Zuckerberg?

On Friday I read a rumour that Facebook would be launching a possible iTunes competitor. Since then the rumour has evolved and claims a more realistic scenario that Facebook will simply be implementing musician-friendly profiles — a feature that will compete directly with MySpace’s Artist platform (responsible for a huge part of their growth).

Rafat Ali of PaidContent says the new feature will actually include iTunes integration for buying music through Apple’s store, special profiles for bands and unique widgets for music promotion, tour dates, and more, all within the clean Facebook interface. Mmm.

This isn’t making third-party Facebook developers very happy! But then again, the Facebook platform does belong to ol’ Zuckerberg and why should he care if he tramples on outside developers? Unlike the third-party guys, he can set up special profiles with unique fields for music artists. But the most important tipping factor here is that only he can lift the limited number of friends per profile from its current 5 000 limit. Shew, do you know anyone with that number of friends?

I rate the potential partnership between the social networking site and the leading online music store will be a total win-win-win scenario that will include consumers/users …

MySpace (the evil empire in this story) will have even more serious competition. And as for Apple, it will have yet another prime facet for musos through which to fuel their iPods. Who knows, perhaps us users can bypass buying music through iTunes itself (which is unavailable in South Africa) and purchase some tunes through Facebook instead?

This whole story has surfaced after Facebook recently became the fastest-growing online property in the United Kingdom, with unique visitors roaring over 18% in August, reaching a total of just less than nine million. That’s more than 2 000% growth in a year!

Gizmodo is worried that “all those losers with crappy bands are going to set up pages on Facebook, find their way into our networks and infiltrate our clean social networking”. But I’m fairly confident that this deal will probably make my Facebook experience far more enjoyable.

No longer will I have every Tom, Dick and Harry requesting me to join band groups, music groups, club groups, event groups etc … Instead users will be able to set up profiles for these categories and probably have a functional interface to manage their information instead of trying to jippo the current interface to work for them.

Does anyone here play an instrument? Let’s start a band!