Lil Wayne
On Tuesday of this week, hip-hop artist Lil Wayne performed before thousands of fans at the Aztec Bowl in San Diego's Cox Arena, breaking tracks from his upcoming album "Rebirth."
Taking advantage of its partnership with the musician, AT&T simultaneously streamed the event across Free For All and Mobile Music Scene, two pages hosted by Facebook.
Lil Wayne's Facebook fan base totals 1.3 million. In terms of buzz, Facebook also is riding considerably more momentum than MySpace at present.
The social network is quickly morphing into a mainstream media communications hub, making it possible for events to unify revelers worldwide, declares All Facebook.
It certainly hasn't hurt the campaign that "lil wayne" was the most keyed-in search term on YouTube in December, reports Hitwise.
Last week for the Presidential Inauguration, CNN collaborated with Facebook to let users provide live commentary through its live feed — resulting in some 600,000 status updates, 8,500 of which were posted in the first minute of Obama's speech (via Mashable).
But AT&T is using the social network as a platform to push sales, not political awareness. The promo was designed to hype Lil Wayne's anticipated single "Prom Queen" — and ideally get consumers to buy the exclusive ringtone and full tracks of the song via AT&T's Media Mall or from AT&T handsets.
Facebook continues to lag behind MySpace among music lovers, however. Rumors circulated early in 2008 that Facebook would try to carve a space for itself in the music sphere, first by giving bands a place to showcase songs and sell music - much like iTunes competitor MySpace Music.
The push for Facebook to develop a native music app has also been bandied-about. Some say it would wipe third-party music apps off its active app market; others predict it will not be able to overcome MySpace's critical mass. (Myspace also has the support of top music labels.)
Whatever happens, Facebook will have to work directly with major music labels to offer direct downloading of tracks from the fan pages, with revenue splits between all participating parties. Incidentally, one such deal to do this was recently fumbled by Warner Music, TechCrunch reports.
