Facebook, Spotify say “I do”

Facebook‘s plan to allow Spotify users to upload and share music on the social networking service marks the latest musical marriage of two online media titans. Well, Spotify isn’t exactly Titanic, but the agreement gives the popular music streaming service–which counts 7 million users and hundreds of thousands of subscribers–enough leverage to compete alongside Apple‘s iTunes and the also-rans of the music streaming market.

Starting today, Spotify users can share music through their Facebook profiles and messages, and connect to Facebook through the streaming site. The deal includes a host of whiz-bang features, such as the ability to send tracks to Facebook friends, seeing what other new music friends have posted, and copying music files to a mobile device sans USB cable.

Americans must hold tight, though. Spotify is only available in Europe, though I highly suspect North American Facebook users will be able to take advantage of the deal when the UK-based streamer lands stateside later this year. It isn’t the only service grabbing on to Facebook’s coattails, however: Pandora inked a similar agreement earlier this month.

The Facebook/Spotify deal is the latest stab in the ongoing battle for streaming music fans’ subscription dollars and advertisers’ spending might. MySpace and Apple acquired streamers imeem and Lala.com respectively for that very reason in 2009. These and others, including Napster, Thumbplay, and Last.fm, utilize a combination of free and subscription streaming services as well as ad-supported streaming to create what has so far been an elusive new revenue channel.

The music industry’s sluggishness to embrace these new streaming technologies has partly forced firms like Spotify to pony up with the likes of Facebook. Labels have seen prices slide from $10 CDs to 99-cent tracks in less than a decade, and a single song stream produces only about a quarter of a penny. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of Spotify subscribers, however, and those single streams could be lucrative.

Whether users will actually take to the partnership depends in part on how they use their Facebook accounts, specifically users’ news feeds. Pandora, for instance, prides itself on keeping news feeds free of Pandora-related chatter, though Pandora users can turn that option on if they want to blast their Facebook friends with what they’re listening to. Spotify strongly believes users will gravitate to the latter option, and has consequently designed its Facebook integration to enable users to keep friends up to date with music activity, 24-7.

Either way, social media-inclined music consumers have never had as many choices as they do today.