Facebook for Self-Promoters: Will FB Attack MySpace’s Entertainment World Dominance with a Freemium Service?

The slightly over the hill online social networking behemoth MySpace has announced a partnership with Zazzle that will allow users to sell custom tee-shirts via their profiles

This makes perfect sense. Merchandise is a great way for artists to make extra cash, and the one place where Facebook still has nothing on MySpace is in the world of music self-promotion.

Because while some pioneering artists have ventured into Facebook territory — Brandi Carlile was my friend, until she removed her profile — the fact that a user can have only 5,000 friends is a real turn-off for artists whose MySpace fans number in the tens or even hundreds of thousands.

Of course, Facebook never intended entertainment world self-promoters to make use of their site the way they make use of MySpace. If Tila Tequila had tried to build her following on Facebook, we sure as hell wouldn’t be watching her sleeping in a bed with 16 lesbians and 16 straight guys on MTV right now.

Facebook created a walled-garden environment where friendships were supposed to resemble — if not exactly replicate — a user’s real-world connections. Since I’m not bosom friends with Christina Aguilera in real life (I wish!) her being my friend on Facebook wouldn’t make much sense in Mark Zuckerberg’s world. But in Tom Anderson’s corner of the Web, I can be her buddy, along with 470,902 other people.

A lot of people think that this means Facebook has no designs on MySpace’s last bastion of dominance, but I see it differently. Zuckerberg has always wanted Facebook relationships to resemble real-world relationships, but that’s not how people are using it. Facebook will have to adapt to actual user behavior or die a slow death.

Since they like to keep things neatly controlled and categorized, I would guess that their long-term strategy for creeping into the music world space is going to resemble their moves in the politics arena.

My prediction: they’ll eventually launch an affordable freemium service that will allow the Tila Tequilas (and Robert Scobles!) of the world to have unlimited friends, special profiles, and access to premium content-sharing applications that will allow users to embed and spread their blog posts, songs and video content far and wide.

It’s just another sensible way to monetize a site whose current valuation is way out of step with profits.

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