As rumors of a pending Facebook/Spotify deal swirled, Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at the e-G8 Forum in Paris Wednesday and reasserted that he has no plans to become the CEO of an entertainment company.
“We don’t have the DNA to be a music company or a movie company,” Zuckerberg said in an onstage one-on-one with Publicis CEO Maurice Lévy.
The comments come just as Facebook is reported to have deepened its partnership with Sweden-based startup Spotify to roll out a more fully integrated music-streaming service within the social networking site, according to a Forbes report published Wednesday citing anonymous sources. The report claims the feature will be called either “Facebook Music” or “Spotify on Facebook.” The new service will reportedly not be available in the United States, as Spotify has not yet cleared regulations to be used in the US.
However, a source familiar with Spotify denied the deeper integration when reached by GigaOM. The company already has a “Spotify on Facebook” feature that allows Facebook users to share links to Spotify songs on their profile pagesA Facebook spokesperson responded similarly, telling me “there’s nothing new to announce” and pointing to the existing integration between the two companies. “Many of the most popular music services around the world are integrated with Facebook and we’re constantly talking to our partners about ways to improve these integrations,” the spokesperson said. Both Facebook and Spotify have separately raised funding from telecom mogul, Li Ka-Shing.
Whether the Spotify/Facebook rumor du jour is true or not, Facebook is clearly keen to get more immersed in the media and entertainment industries. At G8, Zuckerberg noted that while Facebook had no ambitions to move the company from Silicon Valley to Hollywood, entertainment companies could do well to take advantage of all that social networking has to offer. “I hope we can help [media and entertainment] companies become more social. We’re going to see a lot of the transformation in these industries over the next three, five years,” he said. “People listen to music with friends, you read news and discuss it with friends. These industries can be rebuilt from the ground up with social.”
Image of Mark Zuckerberg and French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the 2011 G8 summit courtesy of Flickr user Cyril “cattias.photos” Attias.
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