Facebook’s newest music deal opens door to massive UMG library

A scant couple of weeks after Facebook revealed its in-house music library for budding content creators, the social media site has announced a partnership with Universal Music Group (UMG), a conglomerate that owns the souls of hundreds of popular performing musicians.

According to UMG, the company will license its music catalogs for “video and other social experiences across Facebook, Instagram and Oculus.” I’m not sure what “other social experiences” could mean, but the inclusion of Oculus makes me wonder if UMG’s music will be available to VR game developers.

UMG is one of the big three record companies which dominate music, the other two being Sony and Warner Bros. Rumor has it Facebook is in talks with the other two as well, it might not be long before you can use almost any song in existence in a Facebook video.

Note, though, that nowhere in the announcement does it say the music will be free. It wouldn’t surprise me if some more popular songs (or any of them, really) cost money to use in videos or “other social experiences.”