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| Facebook and Spotify work together on the Boombox Project |
Facebook is working with Spotify to develop new music features that allow users to listen to music while using the Facebook app.
The company plans to play a bigger role on the podcast, recommending shows and episodes based on people's interests first. Then people can comment on it and recommend it to friends.
The company said that 170 million people on Facebook have links to pages referring to specific podcasts, and more than 35 million people are members of podcast fan groups.
Mark Zuckerberg spoke about the collaboration in an interview with Casey Newton on Discord, and Casey Newton wrote an article for Platformer (The Daily News from Big Tech Companies).
The team is creating a new audio player in the app that will allow Facebook users to play music from Spotify without leaving the app.
Facebook internally calls it Project Boombox, and Zuckerberg has focused a lot on this feature, which aims to improve the developer experience on the Facebook platform, especially the ability of musicians to share their work.
This news comes from a huge increase in voice space on Facebook. Facebook announced several new audio features, including the ability to browse and stream podcasts via the Facebook app.
Recode previously mentioned that Spotify's podcast integration is supported and the new audio player supports both music and podcasts and can be used by both paid and free users.
The new player may launch earlier than other Facebook audio features, and other Facebook audio features could take several months.
A Spotify spokesperson said: Our goal has always been to bring Spotify everywhere on all platforms and devices, and to bring music and podcasts to more people. Our new Facebook integration is another step in this effort.
The two companies have worked together in the past. The most famous one is the integration of Spotify into Facebook and Instagram stories.
The collaboration comes at a time when Apple (the common enemy of Facebook and Spotify) is expected to give podcast content a major boost.
The Boombox project is expected to arrive about a week before the social voice features announced by Facebook.