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Dave Jaworski
Carol Pepper
Linda Ronstadt
The Short Lifespan Of Twitter’s Ill-Fated Music App
Music has been the lifeblood of many social media services, but it appears that Twitter will not be one of them. Social media music sites have prospered, with CNET reporting that Spotify recently topped $500 million in revenue. At the same time, however, Twitter has decided to fold its hand in the music business and get out of a hashtag-based sound promotion service. What proved to be the sour note in this social media foray?
In The Beginning
Launched in April of 2013, the Twitter #music platform hoped to connect users to music through hashtag searches. With this app in hand, Twitter allowed users to track Tweets from artists as well as search for popular tracks with hashtag searches of label, record, song, or lyrics. Stating that half of all Twitter users follow at least one musician, Twitter launched the mobile app with the hopes of gaining ground on their social media music competitors like SoundCloud. The app allowed musicians to promote new riffs and tracks with a simple update, while users could directly Tweet songs to followers. Twitter never owned any music itself, drawing its tunes from iTunes, Spotify, or Rdio, but allowed free promotion and distribution.
The High Note
Twitter’s music app enjoyed a brief spell of popularity when some celebrities picked up on the promotion. The New York Times reported that Ryan Seacrest hyped up the app as a means of finding new followers and contacts, going so far as to have a dance party with the streaming music function. Twitter #music peaked at number six on Apple’s downloaded app list, but quickly fell down into the mid-thousands. Competitors like Vine, which allow users to play short videos (including music) within a Tweet, enjoyed steady popularity between the 10th and 20th spot of the Apple app rating.
Lessons Learned
Why did Twitter #music prove to be a bust rather than a boom? Several factors contributed to the downfall. First and foremost, social media users preferred to stay with their established music platforms, and social music sites like Spotify never flinched from the release of #music. Users with slower Internet services can load Twitter easily, since the site has a bare minimum of graphics to slow down the latency, but it takes a stronger Internet service to launch the streaming music function. Some people need satellite Internet to stream videos if their local provider cannot keep up. By comparison, DSL and cable Internet may not reach peak efficiency needed to load Flash programs.
Twitter’s Next Venture
Though Twitter took a blow to the chin, the company is sure to bounce back. Mashable reports that Twitter founder Ev Williams has begun to spend “98%” of his time in development of a new site called Medium, a publishing platform with about 30 employees. Whether this new venture does better than #music remains to be seen, but since Alexa pegs Twitter as the 9th most popular site on the Internet, the social music app’s failure to launch will not keep the company down.
Until next time,
Tim Douglas, Blogger for All Access Group
Tim is a music producer and father of 3 young boys. He runs a studio out of his home (which he also calls his sanctuary).
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Steve Turnidge
Jim Guerinot
Andrew Romans
NASA’s Stunningly Beautiful Space Now on Instagram!
Early last month NASA announced its decision to enter the social media game, creating and maintaining a presence on Instagram. While such a decision may not have monumental significance to either NASA’s space programs or the every day lives of the majority of people, it is definitely an awesome decision with various benefits that may brighten all of our days.
Instagram created a pretty ingenious niche in the social media industry, by basically combining key features of its two largest predecessors: Twitter and Facebook. By taking the best of both worlds, Instagram is an incredible social media magnet (and entertaining time waster.) Twitter thrives on the idea of short, to the point, messages, almost trains of thought, being shared across the web, while Facebook focuses more on longevity, providing easy to scroll timelines of the “social life” of users, for the most part documented through images and pictures.
Well Instagram does both. Bringing quick, thought “process-esque,” sharing to photographs (of course with pretty cool, retro picture effects.) And while Facebook focuses on connecting “friends,” we can probably generalize that statement to “acquaintances,” and Twitter connects friends but most importantly celebrities and athletes to the average Joe, Instagram once again does both, which brings us back to NASA.
Beyond seeing what your friend’s eating in the “Valencia” color effect, or a squirrel searching for a nut, you can see the New York Knicks pre game workouts, Snoop Dogg, or Lion, smoking, and now beautiful images of space, courtesy of NASA. NASA’s public visibility has shrunken over the years as the Space Shuttle program is no more. So, what better way to keep the public informed about the amazing space exploration that is still going on than to share amazingly stunning photos from space? “We’re constantly looking to expand our social media portfolio to include tools that will best tell NASA’s story of exploration and discovery,” NASA Press Secretary Lauren Worley said in the statement announcing the new initiative.
So next time you’re waiting for a train or standing in line for coffee, check out NASA’s Instagram, stare at some star formations, some nebulas, comets, cool stuff; and it may spark your interest. This may be a genius way to increase interest in space exploration, especially amongst the younger crowd who’s on social media 24/7.
Until next time,
Kelli Richards, President & CEO of the All Access Group, LLC
Bruce Burtch
iTunes Radio: Have They Hit It Out of The Park?
Customizable, user integrated, radio stations have become the norm on music playing services, from Pandora to Spotify to fm.Radio; so it was just a matter of time before Apple’s iTunes developed and released a radio application of its own. And in classic Apple style, the iTunes Radio (accessible directly through iTunes, after downloading the new software) hits it out of the park.
Similar to its competitors, iTunes Radio, allows the user to create personal radio stations based on a specific artist, song, or genre. But where iTunes Radio differs from other learn-on-the-fly radio stations is the option to listen to 250, DJ created and genre organized stations. Featured stations range from The Beatles Radio, to the Voice, to “Miley Cyrus Bangerz,” Diplo tracks, and of course iTunes Top 100. In this way iTunes Radio reminded me of Sirius Satellite and other satellite car stations, offering unique, specific music.
But in exploring iTunes Radio, I picked several categories to study in comparing it with its competitors; the categories being: price, and music recommendations. In terms of price you can listen to iTunes Radio for free if you’re okay with listening to advertisements. However if you own an iTunes Match account, $25 a year, which allows you to store all your music in the iCloud and access it on any device, you can listen to iTunes Radio ad-free. Such a deal. Pay for music accessibility and the absence of ads is offered through Spotify as well; Spotify offers free use, with ads, uninterrupted music on a laptop or desktop for $4.99 a month, or uninterrupted music anywhere on all devices for $9.99 a month.
Pandora also offers a free service with advertisements, or an upgrade with similar deals to iTunes Radio and Spotify for either $36 a year, or $3.99 a month. Another great feature of iTunes Radio that can’t really be matched by its competitors is the ability to purchase a song you have recently discovered, again through iTunes Radio, and have it available in your music library. And you own this song, its not just saved in a queue!
Now on to what I think is obviously the most important aspect of iTunes Radio: the music. In this field, at least at the moment, I don’t quite see iTunes Radio competing with Pandora, in that Pandora offers more than 500 genre-based stations, and more than a million songs from more than 100,000 artists. (iTunes claims they have the most, but haven’t put a number on the “most”). It may be this extensive music catalog that Pandora has acquired that makes its music recommendations not only more accurate but more fun.
I can’t tell you how many new songs and artists I have discovered listening to Pandora radio, and in the few hours that I experimented with iTunes Radio I didn’t come across one “new” artist that I hadn’t heard of. This may just be a result of Pandora being in business longer and perfecting the art of recommending music, but to me they clearly had the advantage in this area. In addition, Pandora’s option to learn more about the playing artist and song lyrics is just a nice touch, aiding in your ability to “discover” new musicians.
That being said, iTunes Radio claims the more you use it, the better the recommendations. (Would you expect them to say anything different?). But for now it reminds me of iTunes “Genius recommendations on steroids.” But they have room to grow and most likely will.
Until next time,
Kelli Richards, CEO of The All Access Group, LLC
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