Facebook has added a new feature dubbed Music Stories. This new post format allows people to listen to 30-second clips of any song, artist, or album shared to the social platform. For now, this feature is only available in Facebook’s iOS version and only supports URLs copied from Spotify and Apple Music. Social connections can listen to the previews, and click through to either streaming platform to save the audio to their own accounts, or in the case of Apple, to buy the music from iTunes.
Social media networks have experimented with musical integrations before. This isn’t Facebook’s first rodeo; for awhile, in fact, it had a very tight integration with Spotify, including automatic sharing of track listens to the News Feed and direct links on performers’ profiles. But many of those past efforts have fizzled over time. We’ll be watching to see whether this small step lasts.
