Apple Music Bot Arrives on Facebook Messenger

Apple Music is now available as a bot on Facebook Messenger, which allows you to stream full songs, as long as you're a subscriber. This follows the integration of Spotify a couple of months ago, which offers the ability to create group playlists with help from AI.

To get started, simply open up Messenger on your mobile device or the browser, and search for Apple Music like you'd for a contact. You can also add the bot to an ongoing conversation with your friends, and then share songs within those chats.

The Apple Music bot responds to artist, album, and song names as you'd expect, in addition to reacting to certain emojis with a direct playlist. The last feature doesn't work very well, with the Messenger bot interpreting emojis as search texts. As an example, the 💃 emoji turns into a query for "dancer" instead of dance music.

Facebook had made both these announcements at its developer-oriented F8 conference earlier in the year. And while the Spotify extension is restricted to snippets, the new Apple Music bot allows for full songs to be played.

Those that do not have an Apple Music membership can listen to 30-second previews and share with their friends. Of course, you can also sign up for the music streaming service from within Messenger, which is really what Apple wants with what is essentially another marketing tool.

Apple Music trails Spotify in the number of subscribers worldwide, with the former's 30 million half of the latter's 60 million paid users.