Facebook Makes Its Move Into Music

Facebook has threatened to go big into music for quite a while and last week finally made its move. The company announced that its users can now upload and share their videos that contain music by popular artists and now have it legally licensed for the first time. Facebook also announced a new music feature called “Lip Sync Live” which lets the user lip sync to popular hits.

While Lip Sync Live is aimed at young users (and takes a swipe at lip sync rival Musical.ly in the process), the bigger deal here is the license on music used with user generated videos. It’s aimed more at users that put music to event videos like parties, graduations and weddings, although it can also pertain to music used on videos in a broader sense since people find ways to user music in all sorts of content. Now they can do so without the fear of any negative repercussions (like the video being blocked), although unlike YouTube, there really hasn’t been too much of that on Facebook. That said, this does placate both record labels and publishers, who have been up in arms against the way music has been used on the platform for some time.

This feature is only being rolled out in a few territories at first to work the bugs out before a worldwide launch.

Lip Sync Live is aimed at kids as young as 13 and with good reason. The service has been losing this demographic for a while to other social media platforms and it needs a new “killer app” to bring them back before it loses the next generation of users. Whether a single feature is enough is yet to be determined though, but for Facebook it’s a step in the right direction.

Below is a video describing how Lip Sync Live works (I know that everyone reading this is going to rush over and try this).