As if the music streaming landscape wasn’t crowded enough already, Music Ally reported Yesterday that Facebook is considering to jump into the industry itself. The news, which came via some vague comments from a couple anonymous sources, follows on the heels of reports that Facebook is testing a new monetization strategy to rack up some money from all the video that gets streamed on the social media site every day. (Variety reported earlier this year that through the first quarter of 2015 Facebook clocked an average of four billion video views a day.) However, the company is trying to crack down on unauthorized uploads called freebooting.
While the talk of Facebook’s own music streaming service is still a bit premature, Music Ally reports that the new video monetization is a step in that direction. “It’s a mass land grab,” a source told the site. “Facebook going into the video space was always going to be an enormous, ambitious land grab.”
The next question, besides whether or not this is actually going to happen in the first place, is how Facebook will approach the streaming service. Considering the company’s penchant for buy-outs—Instagram and WhatsApp for example—there’s definitely a chance that Zuckerberg and company will just pay their way into dominance. For now, we’ve got plenty of options as Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music duke it out for the top spot among streamers.
