Facebook Starts Music Sharing Service

Facebook is making everything a social experience and music is next on the list.

Facebook today announced on their blog that they are adding music services on Facebook that will allow users to listen along with their friends to whatever they are listening to. Users can also listen together in a group with one of the friends being the DJ.

Users can listen to the same song, at the exact same time. Facebook equates the experience to being in a club, only at your chair or on your smartphone instead of in an actual club. Still, it’s a good idea that has a lot of traction.

All this works by looking at which friend has a musical note by their name in the chat sidebar. Hover over the name and a dialog box should appear with the option to “listen with” that friend. The music will play through the service that the friend is using. When a new song starts, the party will move into the new song as well.

Users also have the option to chat about what they are listening to. As other people start listening to, they will join the party in a group chat. Only the people that a user has shared their listening activity with can see when they are listening with a friend. They can also control their privacy settings on the app’s page.

This is a great way to discover new music, just as Pandora, Spotify (with an app) and other music services do. While Facebook is using these services to stream the music, it’s also expanding their ever evolving role in social media. Music is a great way to connect with friends and Facebook is making that easier.

Now if only Facebook would let me stream my own personal music collection to my friends. Then the goal of making all of my friends aware of the excellence that is Virtual Boy would be complete.

The music app is currently compatible with Spotify and Rdio. Facebook tells us that they hope to support more services soon. The app launches today and will be rolling out to users within the next two weeks.