In the coming weeks the new twitter #music is going to ignite quite a few things. Will it reinvigorate a music industry that is constantly morphing, not hardly. What it will do though is allow for a constant searching of new music and testing the waters on bands that are fresh to the ears. That indeed is a great option.
A colleague once said over lunch one day, that there aren't any new great bands. It is exactly the inverse. There is so much great music and everyone now has an equal voice when it comes to leveraging social media. The difficulty is that it is just a bit harder to find the music you want to enjoy with the amount of viable options. Twitter will now be a great source for promoting your music so get ta steppin'. The world is waiting for the next great band to be heard.
Read the post on Wired.com
"At first glance, Twitter’s entry into the music business today may be a bit of a head-scratcher. The service had barely launched before people were questioning why Twitter would even want its own music app.
But really, it’s simple: Twitter Music is all about getting you to
spend more quality time with Twitter. It’s about everybody’s favorite
buzzword: engagement.
The app itself works by showing you what’s popular on Twitter, what new artists are emerging, the things people you follow are listening to, and suggestions based on your activity. It also lets you play tracks themselves right in the app–full tracks if you have a Rdio or Spotify account, or 30 second iTunes previews if you don’t. The bottom line of all this is that it’s a place for you to go and find new artists and then (and here’s the part that matters for Twitter) follow and promote them.
Much of the logic behind Twitter Music is based on what the company has learned about the things people already do there, according to an industry source familiar with the launch. People love to follow celebrities on Twitter, and especially musicians. The company notes explicitly in its blog post announcing Twitter Music, “Many of the most-followed accounts on Twitter are musicians, and half of all users follow at least one musician.” (In fact, almost all of the top ten most-followed users are musicians.) Another behavior the company has picked up on is that people often talk to each other about music. They tweet about songs they like, they link to artists, they retweet the things their favorite pop stars say. Twitter wanted to do something to enhance that experience. It thinks Twitter Music will do that–for users, artists, and ultimately the company itself.
It’s a smart play to get more musicians to become more active on Twitter. Let’s say you are Lady Gaga. When your new single drops, you can now use Twitter Music to send it out to every one of your 36 million followers–and they can play it without even leaving Twitter, thanks to Twitter Cards. Her followers can retweet that, effectively amplifying your 36 million strong following by an order of magnitude. Because website can embed tweets, complete with media, news organization and bloggers can take the original Tweet and drop it in a story so people can play the track all across the Web. And if enough people Tweet it, that song hits the Popular tracks page. Which means even more people hear it. It’s an upward spiral You can also imagine what happens to the obscure artist if a Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber tweets one of their new tracks. It’s got amazing viral possibilities that are great for artists, which means they’re more likely to be active on Twitter. And as it turns out, musicians are one of Twitter’s more vital assets.
You can see some evidence of that in the new account sign up process. For years, one of the company’s biggest problems was the “now what” dilemma people faced after creating an account. It meant people signed up, and then abandoned. To keep you coming back it has to get you connected with people you find interesting. It turns out we tend to find musicians pretty interesting. So one way Twitter found to lick that “now what” problem is to hook you up with a friendly neighborhood rock star when you create an account. Today when someone signs up for Twitter, after filling out a profile, it prompts them to follow five suggested users, and those suggestions tend to overwhelmingly be musicians. When Wired created a new account to test the user suggestions, we were hit again and again with suggestions for Usher, Pink, Demy Lovato, Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber, and Victoria Justice. (I had to look that last one up.)
You also can bet that it’s going to take what it learns from Twitter Music to improve existing users’ who to follow suggestions. Feed it just a little preference data, and Twitter’s going to be able to extrapolate from that and make other relevant suggestions based on the things everyone else is feeding it.
And finally, there’s potential for this to just plain work as a way to help you find new music. It’s already abundantly clear how important social is to music discovery. The social aspects of Rdio and Spotify are some of their strongest features. Facebook has become, by way of those two services, something akin to a pop chart of your friends favorite songs. Likewise, Ping’s poor social implementation explains why it never went anywhere.
Yet if you look at your friends’ streams on Rdio or Spotify or Facebook, what you see is more or less a firehose of tracks. You get the bad with the good, the stuff they’re just listening to in the background, the stuff they play for their kids to keep them happy in the back of the van, the stuff they may listen to once and decide they don’t like. Because Twitter Music looks at the things people are actively Tweeting about, it’s a pretty safe assumption that this is music they are actively excited about. Which in turn gets other people to go check it out and, just maybe, follow a new artist.
Music discovery lets Twitter be in the music industry without competing with the music industry. It lets it continue to be a media company that doesn’t actually make media. It’s becoming increasingly obvious with everything Twitter does that it wants to be the place where you interact with media. It already is our second screen. It’s where you talk about the shows you watch with hashtags. You hear tracks from your favorite artists. You see preview clips of TV shows, and even the lead paragraph of stories you may want to read. Twitter is the second screen wonderland where media goes to explode–or at least that’s the idea. And Twitter Music is another cog in that machine. Sure, it’s insane, but it’s insane in the best possible way.
All of which makes Twitter Music smart on a number of levels. It encourages musicians to get on board. It has tools to drive people to be more active and engaged. It gives it yet more power as the go-to second screen provider. It has potential to be a killer a new music discovery tool. And, honestly, it’s also just pretty fun."
A colleague once said over lunch one day, that there aren't any new great bands. It is exactly the inverse. There is so much great music and everyone now has an equal voice when it comes to leveraging social media. The difficulty is that it is just a bit harder to find the music you want to enjoy with the amount of viable options. Twitter will now be a great source for promoting your music so get ta steppin'. The world is waiting for the next great band to be heard.
Read the post on Wired.com
 |
| Our selection of music that was suggested via twitter #music |
The app itself works by showing you what’s popular on Twitter, what new artists are emerging, the things people you follow are listening to, and suggestions based on your activity. It also lets you play tracks themselves right in the app–full tracks if you have a Rdio or Spotify account, or 30 second iTunes previews if you don’t. The bottom line of all this is that it’s a place for you to go and find new artists and then (and here’s the part that matters for Twitter) follow and promote them.
Much of the logic behind Twitter Music is based on what the company has learned about the things people already do there, according to an industry source familiar with the launch. People love to follow celebrities on Twitter, and especially musicians. The company notes explicitly in its blog post announcing Twitter Music, “Many of the most-followed accounts on Twitter are musicians, and half of all users follow at least one musician.” (In fact, almost all of the top ten most-followed users are musicians.) Another behavior the company has picked up on is that people often talk to each other about music. They tweet about songs they like, they link to artists, they retweet the things their favorite pop stars say. Twitter wanted to do something to enhance that experience. It thinks Twitter Music will do that–for users, artists, and ultimately the company itself.
It’s a smart play to get more musicians to become more active on Twitter. Let’s say you are Lady Gaga. When your new single drops, you can now use Twitter Music to send it out to every one of your 36 million followers–and they can play it without even leaving Twitter, thanks to Twitter Cards. Her followers can retweet that, effectively amplifying your 36 million strong following by an order of magnitude. Because website can embed tweets, complete with media, news organization and bloggers can take the original Tweet and drop it in a story so people can play the track all across the Web. And if enough people Tweet it, that song hits the Popular tracks page. Which means even more people hear it. It’s an upward spiral You can also imagine what happens to the obscure artist if a Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber tweets one of their new tracks. It’s got amazing viral possibilities that are great for artists, which means they’re more likely to be active on Twitter. And as it turns out, musicians are one of Twitter’s more vital assets.
You can see some evidence of that in the new account sign up process. For years, one of the company’s biggest problems was the “now what” dilemma people faced after creating an account. It meant people signed up, and then abandoned. To keep you coming back it has to get you connected with people you find interesting. It turns out we tend to find musicians pretty interesting. So one way Twitter found to lick that “now what” problem is to hook you up with a friendly neighborhood rock star when you create an account. Today when someone signs up for Twitter, after filling out a profile, it prompts them to follow five suggested users, and those suggestions tend to overwhelmingly be musicians. When Wired created a new account to test the user suggestions, we were hit again and again with suggestions for Usher, Pink, Demy Lovato, Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber, and Victoria Justice. (I had to look that last one up.)
You also can bet that it’s going to take what it learns from Twitter Music to improve existing users’ who to follow suggestions. Feed it just a little preference data, and Twitter’s going to be able to extrapolate from that and make other relevant suggestions based on the things everyone else is feeding it.
And finally, there’s potential for this to just plain work as a way to help you find new music. It’s already abundantly clear how important social is to music discovery. The social aspects of Rdio and Spotify are some of their strongest features. Facebook has become, by way of those two services, something akin to a pop chart of your friends favorite songs. Likewise, Ping’s poor social implementation explains why it never went anywhere.
Yet if you look at your friends’ streams on Rdio or Spotify or Facebook, what you see is more or less a firehose of tracks. You get the bad with the good, the stuff they’re just listening to in the background, the stuff they play for their kids to keep them happy in the back of the van, the stuff they may listen to once and decide they don’t like. Because Twitter Music looks at the things people are actively Tweeting about, it’s a pretty safe assumption that this is music they are actively excited about. Which in turn gets other people to go check it out and, just maybe, follow a new artist.
Music discovery lets Twitter be in the music industry without competing with the music industry. It lets it continue to be a media company that doesn’t actually make media. It’s becoming increasingly obvious with everything Twitter does that it wants to be the place where you interact with media. It already is our second screen. It’s where you talk about the shows you watch with hashtags. You hear tracks from your favorite artists. You see preview clips of TV shows, and even the lead paragraph of stories you may want to read. Twitter is the second screen wonderland where media goes to explode–or at least that’s the idea. And Twitter Music is another cog in that machine. Sure, it’s insane, but it’s insane in the best possible way.
All of which makes Twitter Music smart on a number of levels. It encourages musicians to get on board. It has tools to drive people to be more active and engaged. It gives it yet more power as the go-to second screen provider. It has potential to be a killer a new music discovery tool. And, honestly, it’s also just pretty fun."
