
Twitter Music will integrate Spotify, Rdio, iTunes, Soundcloud, Vevo and Youtube - youssefsarhan
http://sefsar.com/twitter-music-leak
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hkmurakami
_> Twitter Music will integrate Spotify, Rdio, iTunes, Soundcloud, Vevo and
Youtube_

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.)

~~~
josh2600
I would normally agree with you, but I think you're failing to make a
distinction here.

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.

~~~
hkmurakami
Agreed with you overall. Just one caveat.

 _> 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.

~~~
josh2600
Great point. I'd argue that a partnership with Twitter is amongst two equal
(or near equal) parties OR one where Twitter is the smaller player. A non-
partnership relationship is all relationships with Twitter that are between
Twitter and a smaller organization.

It's completely asinine to have two separate policies for small kids and big
kids, yet that's what we see at Twitter. Is this an example of the 80/20 rule
or something more sinister? I'm not sure.

One thing's for certain: I hate Twitter's monetization strategy not because it
doesn't work but because I find it distasteful.

~~~
hkmurakami
_> A non-partnership relationship is all relationships with Twitter that are
between Twitter and a smaller organization._

Twitter is valued somewhere in the ballpark of $5BB, so every single streaming
music provider (as opposed to the download/purchase platforms of
Amazon/Apple/Google) is small fish compared to Twitter.

~~~
josh2600
Apple and Google are certainly not small fish... They're two of the
highlighted companies, aren't they?

~~~
hkmurakami
Apologies if I wasn't clear. I had meant the music providers "other than"
Apple/Google/Amazon.

(I believe Apple/Google/Amazon only provide discrete music downloads, rather
than streaming services. Apologies if I had misconceptions about their service
offerings)

~~~
monkeyspaw
Spotify has a $3 billion valuation as of last November. Pandora's value seems
more in flux, but is probably somewhere in the 1-2 billion range.

That doesn't seem to me like they're small fish compared to twitter. given how
much valuations fluctuate (Pandora was at $4 billion as recently as 2011), I
think they're all in the same bin.

After all, Twitter's valuation is based on a less certain business model than
the other providers, who have successfully implemented ads and premium
accounts, and have paying customers.

~~~
hkmurakami
Wow I had no idea Spotify's valuation was that big. I stand corrected.

(Pandora is an interesting case, since they've publicly said that they're not
going to be profitable for another 5 years...)

~~~
josh2600
Like I said, partnerships are on a more even footing than people that just
consume the API.

Soundcloud is pretty big too.

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kmfrk
As a European who doesn't have a registered user for a lot of services, I
would much prefer that we decided on some ID for a song or album, so we could
refer to that one link (music://, etc.), and we would get a link for - or in
this case a list - of the music as provided by services that

* 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.

~~~
jamesgagan
this is what the tomahawk project is attempting to do. you should check it
out. <http://www.tomahawk-player.org/>

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jechen
Do we really need another music app? How many of us are (or planning to) use
Twitter for music discovery? For the average consumer, Spotify has just about
everything for anyone. For the avid listener, there are hundreds of quality
music blogs dedicated every niche out there. It seems like Twitter decided
they wanted a slice of the pie- I fail to see how this could possibly fit into
my use case for Twitter (if it's even part of the core product at all). That
being said, I hope they prove me wrong.

~~~
jfb
It will fail as all other attempts at algorithmic music discovery have failed.
Curation (via blogs, &c.) is still by far a better experience.

~~~
bcoates
I'm listening to Pandora right now (I even pay for it!), does it not count?

~~~
jfb
Pandora is the best of a bad lot. They have an interesting approach, but any
lengthy listen will reveal a lot of repetition; not because there's a tiny
universe of music to recommend, but rather because they can't afford to troll
the long tail (downloading stuff from Bandcamp, for instance). What works for
Pandora is their _curation_ , and the marginal cost of increasing inputs is
more than they are willing to spend.

The last record I bought (a single by The Greys) I listened to on
recommendation of a coworker, who's in a band that I like, who had played with
some people who are playing a show with The Greys. I also like going to a
local record store (Soundscapes) and just buying what the people who work
there recommend. Nobody is currently capturing these signals; Facebook is
obviously the one company that has access to perhaps a sufficiency of this
data, but music recommendations are seemingly pretty small beer in the
Zuckerbergian scheme of things.

The lack of a decent music (or film/TV) recommendation system looks a lot like
a business opportunity, but I think that it's fundamentally _not_ a business.
Recommendations can drive business to a retail operation, but how do you sell
recommendations _qua_ recommendations?

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mijustin
While I'm not that interested in _music_ discovery, I would definitely be
interested in _podcast_ discovery. I'd be interested in seeing what podcasts
the people I follow on Twitter are listening to.

~~~
jervisfm
Yeah, I had the same thought as as well. As a start, are there any podcast
here that people listen to and would highly recommend ? They can be dev-
related but other topics is fine too. Any must listen
suggestions/recommendations ?

~~~
DavidChouinard
I _highly_ recommend Radiolab (<http://www.radiolab.org/>), it's one of the
most respected podcasts out there. It's changed the way I see the world.

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astalwick
For what it's worth, I hope that twitter is able to put something interesting
out there. They bought up wearehunted, which was a genuinely slick site -
excellent trending music charts.

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).

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jonathanjaeger
I'm probably an outlier in that I actively look for music on YouTube,
SoundCloud, ex.fm, etc. and prefer it not given to me via playlists or
channels on Pandora or Spotify. That being said, as long as the music
experience on Twitter doesn't detract from Twitter's main use, I can certainly
see the benefit of well-executed embeds from these various music platforms.

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mehrzad
But not Last.fm? I hope that's not true.

Honestly slightly annoyed that each of these social media companies want to
become everything for everyone.

~~~
smosher
Last.fm was excluded due to "licensing issues."

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.

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joeblau
I hope all of those companies do to Twitter what Twitter has done to it's
developers; Cut them off. It's funny how they want to syndicate content from
other platforms but don't want anyone syndicating content from their platform.

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randomdrake
Nice find, but I think it's a pretty big jump to say that because there's CSS
rules for something that it will necessarily be in the final product.

~~~
suyash
True but it's a pretty good indicator. I'll put my money on it.

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jbackus
Twitter is already in a very difficult to monetize space. Why are they
expanding into another comparably difficult to monetize space?

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pokoleo
Obviously this is just the beginning.

wearehunted.com just announced it's acquisition by twitter.

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bmmayer1
No one screengrabbed the stylesheet or sprite before Twitter took it down?

