Facebook has begun rolling out a new music discovery feature to share song clips from Spotify and Apple Music.
The new post format, called Music Stories, lets you post 30-second excerpts of your favourite songs and albums (and eventually playlists too) to the News Feed. The clips get repackaged in Facebook’s new audio player so your friends can sample the songs without leaving Facebook, and they don’t even need to be a Spotify or Apple Music subscriber to hear
If you hear something you like, you can click through to stream the whole song or – of course! – buy it from iTunes by clicking a button on the post. You can also add a song to your Spotify library without leaving Facebook, which seems handy.
Unlike Facebook’s previous attempt at integration with Spotify, which automatically posted everything you streamed to your News Feed, with Music Stories you have to actively post links to songs, and your friends will have to click play to hear them (so no autoplaying Olly Murs clogging up your Feed).
So far it’s only available in Facebook’s iOS app, but the social network is working on bringing the feature to desktops and Android. Facebook also says that more streaming services will support Music Stories in the near future.
As The Verge points out, there’s no clear indication why Facebook couldn’t stream a full song from within in the Facebook app, which could increase Facebook’s usage time and help streaming services to expand their user base.
Spotify recently announced a move into original radio with its In Residence shows, following on the heels of Apple’s Beats 1 radio launch.