Digital music startup Bop.fm’s key feature is its ability to make playlists playable on a range of streaming services, but now it has another feather in its cap: a partnership with Facebook to play songs directly in the social network’s news feed.
“Sharing with your music buddies on Facebook is easy, but having them open another tab is not as fun for them. Solution? We partnered with Facebook to let you and your friends listen to music from any music service directly in Facebook,” explained the company in a blog post.
There’s some heavyweight backing to let music fans know about the new feature too: artists including Ariana Grande, Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa, Jessie J, The Black Eyed Peas, R3HAB, will.i.am, Christina Perri, Switchfoot, Jason Mraz, Lucy Hale and Keith Urban have been sharing Bop.fm song and playlist links from their Facebook pages “with their 233,000,000+ Facebook fans”.
(Sorry to harsh the buzz, but with organic reach on Facebook being what it is, you can take a few noughts off that figure to find the number of fans who’ll actually see the posts.)
Anyway, Bop.fm is making a big deal about the “special partnership with Facebook”, although note that playing songs within the Facebook news feed is far from an exclusive thing. If you share tracks from Spotify to Facebook, they play inline. As do YouTube videos. As do SoundCloud tracks. And so on. So perhaps less of a “special partnership” and more of a neat API integration.
Bop.fm is keen to get more artists using its links when sharing new music or playlists with fans on the social network though. That includes noting that it’s driving both download revenues from iTunes, Amazon and Google Play as well as streaming revenues on Spotify, Deezer, Rdio, Beats and YouTube, and promising analytics after the event to help artists understand where their fans are listening. The latter could be key for Bop.fm’s business growth in the future, we suspect.
The new feature is the latest step forward for Bop.fm, which launched in December 2013, and raised $2m of funding in July 2014, at which point its users had played more than 50m songs from streaming partners.
It has been steadily adding more partners since then, and in December 2014 launched a free iOS app leveraging its Spotify, SoundCloud and YouTube integrations. The company’s competitors include Whyd and SongDrop.
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