TheWebpreneur is reporting that Facebook is gearing up for a big launch later this month: Facebook Music. He’s a bit vague on the details of the service, but it’s nonetheless interesting.

First of all this is likely to go directly head-to-head with main rival MySpace’s music service. In my own personal opinion Facebook does every single thing better than MySpace, but music has been one of the major strong suits of Myspace for a while now and it will be tough to dislodge them as king of the hill.

Second I wonder if this new service is going to attempt to be a Last.fm-killer of sorts. Facebook already has their ‘Statistics‘ page which gathers information on what bands you and the people in your network like, but this is solely based on what you tell them – it seems reasonable that they might try to release some kind of player or iTunes plug-in that transmits the music you are actually listening to to their servers.

If the above idea becomes a reality, Facebook would also be aligning themselves against Google’s Music Trends, the Google Talk-connected tracker which Google hasn’t as of yet used for anything significant other then to split out some data.

If Last.fm is in the crosshairs, perhaps Pandora is as well. After all these services are very vulnerable right now with the decision to drastically raise royalty rates for playing music online. Facebook of course has other ways of making money so perhaps they could step in and provide such a service while maintaining the optimal cost – that being free.

This could be a big move for the rapidly-growing Facebook, though Valleywag thinks Facebook has for bigger things on its mind and will soon enter a war with business networking site LinkedIn for the rights to connect the working folk as they march forward beyond college students. This makes a lot of sense and I completely agree.

For now, the online music landscape appears set to get more interesting. Hopefully more details on what this service will actually entail will get out as we approach the supposed launch (May 21st).