Facebook could launch music service at f8

Rumors have started swirling around the social network's upcoming developer conference

Facebook may be gearing up to announce its very own music service at its upcoming f8 developer conference, according to CNBC technology corresondent Jon Fortt, who says he spoke to someone familiar with the plans.

We reached out to Facebook about the report and received the following response from a company spokesperson:

"There's nothing new to announce. Many of the most popular music services around the world are integrated with Facebook and we're constantly talking to our partners about ways to improve these integrations."

So... maybe?

Reports and rumors have long said Facebook was looking into launching an in-house music service. The only problem is that, though this kind of speculation goes as far back as early 2008, there’s still no real evidence of an official music service from the social network.

As Facebook’s spokesperson notes above, however, many a music service has integrated with the site for social features. Since its July launch, for example, Spotify has let users connect with friends and share tunes with each other through the application. Artists have used Facebook in unique ways too: in June, David Gray let fans use Facebook Credits to purchase access to his live show, which streamed on Facebook.

Even without getting that innovative, hundreds and hundreds of artists have created fan pages on Facebook to promote their music and brand. There are even startups--one raised $16 million today--entirely devoted to helping bands and musicians set up their social network presence.

What an official Facebook music service would look like is tricky, especially if we believe what Zuckerberg said at last year’s Web 2.0 Summit, regarding the area where entrepreneurs can always be safe to develop:

“Content,” says Zuckerberg. Anything related to content creation--music, movies, TV, news--Facebook has no interest in. “Our default is build an open platform. Our best strategy is to enable the next set of entrepreneurs to build all the next businesses and not do that themselves. I don’t even know if we can.”

Facebook’s yearly developer conference, f8 is taking place September 22 at the San Francisco Design Center. Registration costs $400 and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to deliver the morning’s keynote presentation.

Besides today’s report, we’re expecting that Facebook will elaborate on how developers can use the platform for e-commerce and geolocation, in spite of the company’s choice to abandon daily deals and Places, a check-in service.