October 11, 2017
Got a favourite emoji? Now you can listen to songs based on them, with a new music recommendation update on Facebook messenger. Sooo 2017! Facebook and Apple have joined forces to create an Apple Music bot that recommends specific songs or playlists based on one particular emoji. If you prefer to stick to the more traditional method of finding music, you can search genres or artists on Apple Music within messenger.
As expected, some emojis have better search results than others! Here is what my search results were for the , & emojis:
Clearly, some of the emojis just take the names of artists and albums into consideration. Slightly disappointing as I think the ‘clown’ emoji deserved his own mood…
The bot will serve you a link that allows you to listen to the songs within Facebook messenger. Okay, so that’s not that impressive, however, you can also use the chat extension in messenger that allows you to share clips of songs directly to each of your Facebook friends. This extension is enabled by following the (+) menu within messenger itself.
This is clearly Apple’s attempt to get more people to subscribe to their music streaming service. You can only listen to full songs if you’re a subscriber, however, you can send 30-second clips and preview the songs regardless.
Personally, for song identification purposes, this new update is pretty ideal. Similarly, for Facebook messenger addicts the idea of listening to their favourite music without having to leave the app is likely to be encouraging. However, with more than 200,000 active bots from over 100,000 developers, will this update make its mark & are emojis set to take over the social stratosphere? Only time will tell…