Facebook Says Open Graph, Timeline Drive Music Discovery [Stats + Top 6 Music Apps]

Many were critical when Facebook launched its Open Graph and Timeline last year, worried it would drive down engagement and music discovery.  But according to new stats provided by the social networking giant, the changes have been good for music discovery and apps. 

Since launching Open Graph last September, Facebook says tgar 62.6 million songs have been played 22 billion times across a wide variety of music apps.  As examples of Facebook music apps showing the most impressive growth, the company named:

• 8tracks
• BandPage – "The number of Open Graph actions shared by people through BandPage has grown by 3x in the last few months."
• KKBOX
• Saavn
• Songza – "1 million referrals from Facebook, up from 650,000 the month before, with Facebook-connected users listening about 20% longer than other users. Songza has also upgraded to the latest Facebook SDK for iOS to take advantage of the most recent features."
• SoundTracking: The web and mobile app lets people share favorite songs by identifying the music playing around them and enabling them to share the song with a photo, location, and comment. SoundTracking's monthly active users are up over 50% from last month's.

Facebook also touted the growth music streamers Deezer, iheartradio and Spotify. (No Rdio ?) Deezer has seen the number of people using their app triple since the beginning of the year, accoding to Facebook and and are adding 50,000 new users per day.

In a blog post, Facebook also offered best practices for music app developers.