Facebook Music: Listen To Music With Your Friends While Chatting

Facebook gives you a lot of features to socialize with your friends and family. It gives you latest news and updates about them, and also lets you interact with them and connect with them on a whole new level. It is said that music is one of the most powerful ways to connect with others. Be that as it may, music is also the most fun way to connect with your buddies. People enjoy music in real life when they are alone, but not as much as they enjoy it when they're with their friends. Since Facebook is all about sharing real life events, what if you could share your music-listening experiences with others as well? And we're not talking about posting YouTube links on your wall here.

What if you could listen to music with others over your chat? Well now, Facebook allows you to do just that! Now, you can listen to a song with your friends at the exact same time, so you could all feel the energy simultaneously!

How to add music to Facebook?

Facebook has been working with third party app providers to integrate music on Facebook. Since Facebook doesn't have its own music service (which it should have), you will have to use a third party app. For this purpose, some major music apps have emerged, such as Spotify, Slacker, Pandora, iLike, and more. You can search for these apps and install just like you would install any other like Farmville.

 

Once installed, you'll see a separate tab for music in your left sidebar, listing all the music applications you have installed. Once you go over to that tab, you'll get a whole new dashboard depending upon the apps you chose.This will allow you to listen to music as you browse through Facebook. You can search for music, or listen to trending albums. Additionally, you can see what is popular with your friends.

To start off, go over to your music dashboard, or search for third party apps listed above. It's a simple process.

How to listen to music with your friends?

According to a blog post by Spotify, once u install the app, "You'll start seeing new music posts and play buttons all over your news feeds. Hit a play button and the music starts. Right there. Spotify fires up to give you a new soundtrack to your social life. Check out your new Music Dashboard and your real-time ticker to discover the music that's trending with your friends.'

 

You can start listening to songs by clicking on the  icon next to music links. Such links will appear in your news feed, or in your ticker letting you know when someone is listening to music. If your friend is presently listening to a song, you will see a  icon next to their name in chat, or in the ticker. Clicking it will open up a chat with your friend and start the song right there! Cool huh? Going to your music dashboard, you'll see which of your friends listened to a song, and by which service. When you click on the music icons, you'll be prompted to install that service's app if you haven't already done so.

Some popular music services

Spotify is the most popular service around here. It has over 22.5 million monthly active users. But unfortunately, Spotify is not available for every country. They are working on expanding their influence, but as yet, they are still mostly limited to the U.S and some other countries in Europe.

Rdio is another popular music service. It was built for social interactions, and hence, it integrates well with Facebook. You can sign up for it just by connecting your Facebook account. But again, it is not available for every country :(

Along with these, there are two more popular service that have recently surfaced. Slacker and Deezer.

Some problems with music services

Since this is a very popular and traffic-lucrative idea, a lot of scams have also begun to surface. For example, in my research for this article, I came across multiple apps that required me to turn off secure browsing. Now agreeing to that would be voluntarily handing over your information. We talked more about this in our post on how to beef up your Facebook security.

Secondly, most of these apps are not available for every country. So people who don't have access to this feature feel really left out. These apps would really benefit if they extended their reaches.

Despite the problems and security concerns, this really is a great feature. And Facebook is trying constantly to improve it. You can still listen to music and share it with your friends. Just head over to your music dashboard and start rocking :)