Facebook reportedly in talks to put music videos in your news feed

Facebook has held licensing talks with record labels and is proposing lucrative revenue-sharing deals.

This was followed by reports that said Facebook has been testing a “suggested videos” feature, similar to YouTube’s, as well as rolling out more in-play adverts on such videos. They’ll be going after Netflix too, if this works out. Enticing these industry heavyweights will be the prospect of receiving a 55% share of the revenues generated from adverts playing between music videos on Facebook. A source familiar with the matter said the last thing Facebook wants to do right now is take on Apple, which recently launched a rather successful Apple Music, in a streaming war.

One major label source also told Billboard that they’ve had no discussions with Facebook about a streaming service, and were surprised by the reports. Record labels are known to frown upon making music available for free – something YouTube and music streaming services do – since it hurts the pockets in terms of sales.

However, Facebook either doesn’t know what it needs to construct at the moment or it does and it just don’t want to give any detail whatsoever further than rejecting the clear prediction. Facebook has urged publishers like CNN, Buzzfeed and ESPN to publish original videos to the News Feed, allowing them to post them on YouTube and Vimeo, which then gets linked back to Facebook. It has also encouraged users to upload their own video content.

However, the social network is reported to still be working with record labels on “something unique”, and even if Facebook is not getting into the music streaming business, there is a strong chance that the unique project it is working on is video related. The Verge expressed that moving into music video makes sense for the networking giant. Facebook has already experimented with the medium, having provided the platform for Jay-Z to premiere the video for his song “Holy Grail” in 2013, and it has made heavy use of short clips in its new instant articles.

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.

YouTube is downplaying Facebook as a competitive threat.