Twitter To Try Music Again

Music artists have been one of Twitter's major attractions, commanding 7 of the 10 most followed accounts, so it was a bit of a surprise when its #Music service failed as mightily as it did. The platform wanted to center around music discovery, but no one seemed to care. That was simply not enough of a hook to even get people to try it, let alone switch from one of the major services like Spotify or Pandora.

That said, rumor has it that Twitter hasn't given up on a music and will soon announce a second attempt. This time the company has come to the conclusion that it's better to have an existing music platform as a partner instead of trying to go it alone. It's been reported that the service is in talks with other streaming services, as well as music video service Vevo.

While there's no hint of how Twitter might deliver music even with an audio streaming partner, there's some speculation that it might try to deliver short tweet-sized music videos with a video partner. Of course, one of the unknowns is if anything less than a full song would be a satisfying experience for a listener, but that could be said for 140 characters worth of text as well, and we know how that turned out.

Twitter as it is right now can be a powerful promotional tool for many artists and bands, and a workable partnership to deliver music can make even more attractive to the music community. Stay tuned for an upcoming announcement.

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15 Under-Appreciated Events That Affected The Music Business In 2013

We’re coming to the end of 2013, so now is a good time to look back at the music business happenings of the year to see the trends and events that affected it. The following 15 events may have been taken lightly at the time, but at least some of them will have a lasting effect on the industry.

The events are broken into three major areas: music distribution, artists and record labels, which all include tech and marketing related events to some degree. Here we go, in no particular order of importance.

Music Distribution

1. Spotify sets its mobile service partially free and expands into 55 countries, then licenses the Led Zeppelin catalog to help with the promotion. Time to get all the market share possible before the deep pocket competitors like Apple and Google hone in on the sector. 

2. Crying poverty despite 72 million monthly active users, Pandora tries to lower its licensing royalties by buying a terrestrial radio station. Royalty collection organizations, artists and songwriters decry the move as suits fly back and forth. Bottom line, Pandora still loses money.

3. iTunes Radio is unveiled amid much fanfare in September, reaches 20 million users in a month, then disappears from the public consciousness. Is the service a sleeping giant or just sleepy?

4. Beats Music and YouTube Music both postponed their launches until 2014. The streaming music services competition is stiff; they have to get it right out of the gate.

5. Twitter’s #Music lies dormant after few adoptions, which proves the point - just because you have a large user base doesn’t necessarily mean that users want to get their music from you.

6. Pirating decreases as users find that streaming is more convenient and efficient. Pirates are also found to be some of the most prolific music consumers, so is the decrease good or bad?

7. The first YouTube Music Awards show proves that it’s what seems like a good idea isn’t always so, as it draws shockingly few viewers. You can be the largest online music portal, but that doesn’t mean that users want to watch your event. Read more on Forbes.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter and Facebook for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Twitter's New Music Features

Everyone's getting caught up in IPO fever after Twitter announced that it was filing to become a public company last week. Almost lost in the announcement was two new music features that could actually have some bearing on the offering.

First of all is the new Verified filter, which can be set to only show users who have verified accounts by Twitter. This is primarily a feature that's useful for artists who experience a surge in popularity and find that their @mentions are getting out of control.

The filter sits under the Connect tab and will show only those users that have a profile with a little blue tick that symbolizes their public standing. This is said to be incorporated as a way to get Twitter's more high-profile users to personally interact more, rather than delegating it to their social media person.

The second new feature is the new Spotify app, which will deliver to Spotify users whatever is trending on Twitter, which could be a boon to up and coming artists breaking on Twitter but not on other forms of social media.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Follow me on Forbes for some insights on the new music business.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.