• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, October 8, 2007

It looks like Facebook is readying a new feature that will let musicians create pages for their bands and promote their tracks and upcoming concerts on the site. News of the service surfaced late last week on PaidContent.

With this initiative, aimed at capturing a bigger share of the indie music crowd, Facebook will challenge rival social networking site MySpace in one of its oldest core strengths.

In MySpace's early days, the site grew a big following of independent musicians, who posted MP3s, concert dates and the like online. Even now, the site continues to leverage its strong ties to the music world, by promoting record labels, bands and concerts. Additionally, last year, MySpace forged a deal with Snocap to allow musicians to sell downloads from the site.

News of Facebook's upcoming musician-oriented service also comes just several days after it was revealed that Facebook also is planning to challenge LinkedIn by offering members the ability to separate their friends from business contacts and show different information to the different groups.

Of course, just as all of LinkedIn's users probably won't abandon that site in favor of Facebook, not all of MySpace's musicians will depart for Facebook. But some of them will -- or at least, they will spend less time on MySpace if they decide to create additional profiles on Facebook. After all, managing profiles on two social networking sites will require more time than one. And with Facebook's remarkable recent growth in membership showing no signs of slowing down, it seems inevitable that MySpace, LinkedIn and other prominent social networks will have to try harder to keep people on their sites.