Share Apple Music and Spotify Clips to Facebook With New Music Stories Feature for iPhone

Today, Facebook launched a new feature called Music Stories for its iPhone app, which allows users to share Spotify, Apple Music and iTunes songs to their news feeds and preview the posted song natively on the social network.

The new audio player will allow for 30-second song and album preview clips, which users are able to save to playlists or purchase directly from the post. The audio player is also very visually appealing with an image of the artist or album cover spinning like a record.

Users don't have to be paid subscribers to a music service to post or listen to the songs, and neither app has to be installed on the phone to listen through Facebook. All you need is the Facebook app, an iPhone and some music savvy friends to listen to their posts.

The feature is Facebook's first ventures into music streaming since its deep integration with Spotify back in 2011, according to The Verge. It does, however, continue the social network's long held strategy of promoting new initiatives to keep users on its platform as long as possible. If users don't have to click on a link that takes them to Spotify's web player or to iTunes, that's all the better for Facebook.

Other music streaming services will be supported soon according to Facebook, and hopefully Android users can get in on the action as well.

However, since full song playbacks are not included on this new feature it's kind of a puzzling move. Yes, the audio player is cool and it will be helpful not to be redirected back to a different app like those pesky Spotify embeds that crowd the Internet. But, at just 30 seconds long, users may ultimately just ignore these posts all together and instead opt for YouTube videos, which already play natively on the social network.

It also appears to take a lot of steps to share the song as the video below shows.

Tags

Facebook, Spotify, Apple Music