Facebook Trying To Get You Your Dance Video’s Soundtracks!

No one spots revenue opportunities like Facebook!

Facebook’s simple ambition is to be your “everything platform”. And that in itself, is a huge mission statement!

Look at Facebook and it’s activities over the last 3–4 years and you’d realise that quickly and quietly, Facebook has brought on board, any and all content, functionalities and capabilities to keep its users engaged with the parent platform — be it WhatsApp, Instant Articles, Free Basics, Facebook for Business, or Instagram — there’s very little that Facebook isn’t doing to keep you hooked on.

Clearly, it doesn’t want any of its users to go anywhere other than Facebook, for any of their needs.

Yet, one of the gaping holes in it’s net is Music.

Well, you oughtn’t be surprised that Facebook has reportedly been in talks with record labels to get music videos in to people’s feed since at least 2015!

There’s another report that mentions Facebook’s working on building an anti-piracy tool for music that would go hand-in-hand with its Rights Manager Tool that impedes video freebooting.

Now it seems that Facebook has amplified its efforts in order to concentrate on securing copyrighted music for user-generated videos.

If these deals related to the music labels don’t fall in place then Facebook definitely will be at the receiving end of user ire, as the Rights Tool will prevent users from uploading videos that contain label-owned music or even straight up remove videos that have any trace of label-owned music.

So, if your college pals and you meet up for a small reunion and you decide to put up a crazy dance video from the night on Facebook, then chances are your favourite tunes on which you were dancing might not make it to the video simply because of them being label-owned music.

This could put off users and they wouldn’t really feel like making videos for Facebook in the coming years, bereaving the social media network of its most lucrative and exciting content.

Recently YouTube also provided solution for the same problem with the adoption of Content ID system. What Content ID System does is that it identifies the employment of copyrighted music and allows the music owner with two options — either to have the video removed or to become the recipient of a revenue share from the advertisements displayed with the video.
Now declining the second option wouldn’t be sign of business smarts, as videos have become windows to a world full of opportunities, for artists.

You may not know this, but Facebook has already built its own audio fingerprinting technology that automatically displays the songs you are listening to, or movies and shows that you are watching so that your friends could also know and get tagged in a status update.
The label-owned music deal is the next feather in the cap that Facebook is planning to add, so that they can get paid for video soundtracks.

This can be lucrative deal for smart label owners as they might work some way to make the most of these revenue and distribution options. In fact, Facebook recently hired Tamara Hrinvak who has worked as director with Google and YouTube music partnerships in the past, to head Faceook’s music strategy and to work with the labels to drive partnerships and agreements.

Looks too good, too soon, right?

Actually some issues can arise in this scenario of deal between Facebook and music label owners as it is possible that Facebook might face difficulty in deciding as to whether the use of music was incidental, which is to say that the song is more of an adjunct to a video and not a calculated move of piracy, where the video is really just a place-holder where users can search and listen to a song for free. The latter that is looked down upon by some record executives on YouTube.

If this deal works out well then it’s a win-win situation for both label owners and Facebook as Facebook can gain leverage over labels by inventing a feature that suggests particular songs for people to use as soundtracks.

Facebook recently introduced mid-roll ads within its videos and thereby started sharing revenues with creators. This move created tremors in the streaming world, especially for YouTube, which has stood as a strong business model in the streaming world for over a decade.

Now the question that arises is: Will Facebook eat up on YouTube’s business?

Facebook certainly is a potential threat to YouTube as it has around 28% of the world’s population hooked on to it. To provide you with more comprehensible figures, Facebook enjoys around 1.86 billion monthly active users. With the ability to plug in soundtracks, Facebook will be able to take away from YouTube its most engaging content, which is music videos.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.