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Source:Valleywag

On Friday we wrote about Facebook launching a possible iTunes competitor. We’ve now found a new, more compelling rumor from Rafat Ali at paidContent. Instead of a music store, Facebook is said to be launching an artist platform to compete with MySpace’s musician platform that has been a huge part of their growth. Ali says that the platform also includes iTunes integration for buying music through iTunes, special profiles for bands and unique widgets for music promotion, tour dates, and more, all within the clean Facebook interface.

This is bad news for iLike, the most popular third-party Facebook app. The company’s President said in July, “our goals are first to become the dominant music player on Facebook and, second, to become profitable.” Sorry guys, your day of reckoning has arrived.

We’ve always said that the Facebook Platform was Zuckerberg’s playground and he has no problem stomping on outside developers. Facebook has the unique ability to set up custom profiles with special fields for artists, fully integrated song downloading, and, maybe most importantly, only Facebook can remove the 5,000 friend limit that has limited the amount of useful fan outreach on the site thus far.

This makes a lot more sense than launching yet another music store. A partnership with an existing outlet such as iTunes could set Facebook up with an easy way for artists to sell music and to make deals record companies to get already signed bands on board. It might be time to consider Apple as a possible investor now that the Microsoft-Facebook rumors have cooled off a bit.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 11:30 pm and is filed under myspace, facebook, apple, itunes, ilike, Rumors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.