Radio 2.0 (Fr & En)

In 2012, much of the world became accustomed to seeing what our friends were listening to on Facebook. It was the year when millions of us stopped listening to digital music alone quite so much, and began tuning in together, whether at the same time or asynchronously.

It’s easy to poke fun at the way this feature also lets you see music you don’t want to listen to. (“Great. Now I know that half my friends listen to music I can’t stand.”) But it has been an exciting trend since 2011; includes a lot more than just Facebook; and is far from over.

When you use your Facebook credentials to log into a music app, it’s not easier for you, but it also lets Facebook hook into what you’re listening to, and that is a large part of how the world’s largest social network, with over a billion users as of September — that’s about one seventh of the known humans in the universe — was able to pull this off.

To find out what Facebook thinks about what it has done for music — and what music has done for it — we spoke with Facebook manager of strategic partnerships Ime Archibong as 2012 came to a close.