Pandora plus Facebook = Social Music

21 Apr

Here’s some exciting news for music lovers out there:

Music discovery engine Pandora is receiving some deep social integration with Facebook, Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today at the F8 Developer Conference.Made possible by Facebook’s new Open Graph protocol, Pandora will be able to stream music directly on Facebook.com from bands you’ve “liked” across the web. You’ll be able to see which of your friends likes similar music and check out what other music they like and have in their collections.

The combination of Open Graph and the new, wide-reaching “Facebook Like” button around the web means that “liking” a band on a third-party site will register with your Facebook profile, which can in turn inform your Pandora profile even while you’re discovering music at other points around the web. It also tightly hooks your Pandora profile with your “real” social graph of friends on Facebook.

Pandora Partners with Facebook for Social Music – Barb Dybwad

For music junkies like me, this is great news. I tried out the iLike application when I first joined Facebook, but I’ve always loved Pandora. For the uninitiated, Pandora is an internet radio station that plays music you like. Create an account, enter a song, artist or album you like and Pandora will create a radio station playing similar music for you. You can give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to each song, which helps Pandora create better recommendations. You can only listen to each song once, so enjoy it while you hear it, but there’s always something new to listen to.

Facebook was smart to integrate with Pandora, as MySpace still seems to be the place to be for most bands and musicians. This could really give Facebook and Pandora the momentum they each need to stand out as tops in their respective fields.

Have you used Pandora? What do you think of this deal?