AT&T is turning to online social media for the streaming of a live performance featuring the release of Lil Wayne’s debut track from his upcoming album “Rebirth.” It’s the first time AT&T has offered up this type of a streaming concert live via social media channels, and it’s a major milestone for artist Lil Wayne as well. The concert, which takes place in San Diego next week, will have live feeds on two AT&T Facebook Pages here and here between 9-10 p.m. PST on Tuesday, Jan. 27.

This is a pretty good way for AT&T to tap into its core demographic, and turn the act of a concert into a highly social event. Given the success of CNN‘s collaboration with Facebook for coverage of the Presidential inauguration last week, it’s clear that Facebook is becoming a mainstream media stronghold for reasons beyond simply networking online, while still managing to make such mainstream media a socially unifying experience on a global scale.

Perhaps that’s why AT&T is so anxious to promote Lil Wayne’s new album through its existing Facebook pages, which are still less interactive than what you’ll find on MySpace. So in that regard, it’s interesting that AT&T is placing such an emphasis on its Facebook channels for its social media push. As Facebook continues to gain momentum over MySpace, it could also be said that Facebook’s necessity for pushing out a native music application is only exacerbated with the presence of AT&T’s live streaming concert.

The move is good for Lil Wayne as well, as he already has a highly popular Facebook fan page and his followers are likely to be excited about the availability of the live concert, which will feature the debut performance of his anticipated new single “Prom Queen.” Additionally, AT&T will be using this promo to push sales of the exclusive ringtone and full track of the song via AT&T’s Media Mall or directly from AT&T handsets. Given the huge success of Lil Wayne in the past year specifically for the ringtone market, it becomes more obvious as to why AT&T is going the social media route for its concert partnership with Lil Wayne.

What would be more interesting to see is how Facebook could eventually benefit from online events being held on its website. I already mentioned the success of Facebook’s partnership with CNN, as well as Facebook’s potential for a native music app when it comes to events such as AT&T’s live concert. Should Facebook have its own music app then perhaps we could see direct consumer market options for downloading tracks directly from a Facebook fan page with revenue splits between all participating parties. There’s a wealth of potential here, especially for Facebook, and hopefully we’ll see more development in the future for continuing to build out its platforms and applications to support such an economy that would greatly benefit end users.