It will then proceed to eliminate integration one by one as Twitter Music proper gains traction and mindshare.
Unfortunately this is going to be the consensus attitude towards anything Twitter & 3rd party. We just have to look at things with suspicion and cynicism. Call it mental-self-defense if you will.
(Come to think of it, "partner with someone until we catch up to them, then shut them out" is fairly standard practice in the manufacturing/hardware companies in the past.)
We, the peasants, get a different level of access to Twitter than say Google or iTunes might. There's no chance that Twitter can afford to cut off access to iTunes as it scales because iTunes is much bigger than Twitter.
Whereas Twitter can afford to bully the small companies of the world, they cannot bully Apple or Google.
In short, using Twitter API's is suicide. Partnering with Twitter could still foster some potential profit.
>In short, using Twitter API's is suicide. Partnering with Twitter could still foster some potential profit.
If you're smaller than Twitter, be somewhat wary of what might happen to said partnership in the future. Make sure you don't become obsolete in Twitter's eyes.
edit: The warning signal should probably be louder for the partner providers though.
* I actually use (have a user for/access to, etc.),
* offer the music in my region
A modern problem that really annoys me these days, is that people are increasingly sharing music behind registration wall or region restrictions.
Just look at Hulu, Netflix, Spotify - the list goes on. In a time where we're supposed to share and break barriers, a lot of people are growing increasingly unaware of the people who don't have access to many of the services that purport provide people with this media.
I have a bad feeling that this could have the exact opposite effect and result in a lot of "broken links" for people with no access. I see this a lot on Tumblr right now.
Using suggestion models based on curated reputable crowdsourcing as opposed to simply volume of popularity is a way around this.
Here's a contrived example; say I'm looking for something that goes well with say, Lonnie Smiths' 1980 "In the Park" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBPSf-VoDZk) and say, Jon Lucien's Listen Love (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Bm7c0z_0ws) and let's toss Fela Anikulapo Kutis' Witchcraft in there (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31cGWpe8_L0).
There is no software in the world that can curate music like that based on predictive modeling that I've seen.
I've been trying to make one for years that can span decades, nations, and genres like that.
I've found that if I aggregate a selective circle of people than I can get there. But that's the only way I've found so far.
Ok, USE CASE 2.
What's Justin Bieber or Keith Richards currently listening to? What about a talent scout at BMI? What if you could follow and tap into those people's personal playlists like twitter allows you to tap into what's on their plates for dinner and other personal things?
And I mean right now. Shania Twain hits play and it sends that to the server. Thousands of users world-wide tapping into her personal radio station immediately get a non-time-shifted instant feedback.
I think it would be compelling and addictive.
It's the classic celeb allure that's been twitter's mainstream pot of gold.
obviously no product is going to fit everybody's use case. but if you look at the number of links to music videos on youtube that are passed around every day, it's pretty clear that music on twitter fits a lot of people's use case.
Problem solved!
Also highly recommend: Startups for the Rest of Us.
I'm a little concerned that they'll try too hard to 'integrate' it with twitter. I'm not that interested in hearing the music that the people I follow on twitter listen to, nor am I interested in reading about how good a musician's latte tasted this morning. It seems to me that twitter and music are somewhat separate.
(Full disclosure: I work for https://wavo.me , which is a social network for music).
Honestly slightly annoyed that each of these social media companies want to become everything for everyone.
I don't mean that literally, I mean that in the same sense last.fm uses it when presenting it as an excuse for the downward spiral they pretend is a service. Whether they're inflexible with regards to any kind of deal with Twitter or, or Twitter was uninterested in including them, it's their own fault—and direct a product of whatever "licensing issues" really means.
wearehunted.com just announced it's acquisition by twitter.
