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Spotify and Facebook in music partnership

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday presented a partnership with Swedish firm Spotify, to make its popular music streaming service an integral part of the social media website's platform.

Published: 23 September 2011 11:07 CEST

Spotify and Facebook in music partnership

Spotify is growing fast and reported this week that it now numbers in excess of two million paying users for its unlimited music service in nine countries worldwide.

US firm Facebook has launched a slew of changes to the presentation and function of its platform this week and on Thursday Zuckerberg presented the firm’s plans, with Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek the first to join him on stage.

“This is a big day for Facebook and big day for Spotify, music-lovers and artists,” Ek said.

Spotify is among 33 European launch partners to roll out “social apps” on Facebook as the social networking site seeks to move toward entertainment, including video, films, music, books and television.

Spotify’s app will allow Facebook users to listen to music with their friends and share their favourites and music listening habits via their profile. Facebook’s 800 million users will gain access to music for free, while ensuring that artists are compensated for their work.

“Let’s light up the world with music,” Ek said.

The Spotify app in practice will mean that the newly designed Facebook “timeline” feature will update with music the user is listening to, as well as favourite albums, artists and playlists.

Spotify was founded in 2006 by Swedes Daniel Ek, then in his twenties, and Martin Lorentzon.

The service first launched in 2008 in Sweden and says it has since become the world’s largest streaming service with over 10 million users worldwide.

It has some 300 employees and is viewed as an opportunity for the music industry to regain the market share lost through illegal downloading.

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New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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