After, reportedly, months of negotiations on music rights, Facebook has announced a range of new agreements in recent weeks, with deals now in place to enable sharing of music content from Universal and Sony, which will be added as part of Facebook’s new ‘Sound Collection’ audio library.
And now, Facebook’s added another set of tracks to their growing list, with a new deal signed with Global Music Rights, which represents a range of popular artists.
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As explained by Facebook:
“Global Music Rights represents such esteemed writers and performers as Pharrell Williams, Bruno Mars, Drake, Bruce Springsteen and Smokey Robinson, among others. We are thrilled to partner with Global Music Rights and look forward to building a bright future with Irving and their amazing writers.”
In addition, Facebook has also announced separate deals with SESAC and HFA/Rumblefish, “so that indie writers’ music can come to life and find their audience on our platforms”.
As with the others, the Global Music Rights arrangement will enable Facebook users to add music to their videos and other content without infringing copyright, and subsequently having their posts taken down.
The addition of more music options will help publishers create more engaging video, which, in turn, will improve the quality of video content produced on Facebook, attracting more viewers. It also alleviates the ongoing issues Facebook faces in detecting and penalizing those who violate copyright rules.
But still, Facebook needs a way to track music use in order to ensure the artists are compensated – which Rumblefish, a music licensing company, will help with.
Again, as per Facebook:
“Rumblefish will help Facebook optimize the identification and clearance of musical works through an innovative data-sharing agreement. This partnership with HFA/Rumblefish and an opt-in for independent publishers opens as of today.”
This will enable Facebook to improve their music identification tools, to help optimize their compensation process.
There are various benefits to Facebook’s new music deals, while they also underline the new media reality, where publishers understand the need to work together on compensation and rights deals. For marketers, having the capacity to add popular music to videos will provide new ways to put together more engaging, interesting presentations – and with video being the best performing content type on the platform, that can only help boost your Facebook performance.