Facebook may not be building a music streaming service, but it just might be looking to get into music videos.
The social networking company has held talks with major record labels about getting the licensing rights to incorporate music videos into its news feed, according to a report in The New York Times that cites several anonymous sources.
The move would ratchet up the competition with YouTube, the Google-owned video website that has long reigned as the Internet’s most popular hub for videos — music videos are a particularly big draw at YouTube.
Video views on Facebook have been booming of late, thanks in large part to the autoplay feature. Facebook says it now streams 4 billion videos per day.
Facebook apparently wants to begin adding music vids in the coming months. The record labels would choose which videos appear on Facebook, and Facebook and the labels would share revenue from advertising that appears alongside the videos, according to the New York Times report.
Facebook is promising the record labels better ad revenue share terms than YouTube, according to one source cited by the New York Times. And Facebook is also saying it will do a better job of preventing unauthorized content from appearing on its service.
There had been reports in recent weeks that Facebook was looking to build a streaming music service that could compete with Spotify and Apple Music. But Facebook has said flat out that it has no plans to get into music streaming.
As reported by Business Insider