What Happened To Twitter's Music Strategy?

We can learn a lot about the Internet from its artifacts—the websites that seemed exciting and innovative at the time, but have since been abandoned by both their users and their creators due to a lack of novelty, accuracy and/or relevance. One such artifact happens to be music.twitter.com.

Visitors to music.twitter.com expecting a thorough, up-to-date education of Twitter's undeniable influence on the music industry (and vice versa) will be disappointed. The one featured tweet on the site, a promotion for Dan + Shay’s album Where It All Began, dates back to 2014. Below this tweet, there are links to Twitter’s nonexistent apps on Spotify and the now-defunct Rdio and iTunes Radio. More alarmingly, the “For Artists” link at the bottom of the page redirects to the general Twitter blog, perhaps inciting the claim that “Twitter has nothing for artists.”

Of course, Twitter’s music metrics make this claim blatantly false. 98% of the top 100 artists on the Billboard Year-End charts from the last five years have a Twitter account, and six of the top 10 Twitter accounts today are musicians (Katy Perry, Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift take the top three slots). On the consumer side, 61% of fans say that content on Twitter made them interested in buying a single or an album, and 78% of Twitter users are likely to buy music every month, versus 57% of non-users. Touring artists and industry executives regularly host live Twitter Q&As, engaging in direct, two-way interaction with their followers. In short, a substantial percentage of the social network’s conversationalists are among the most powerful and most active people in the music business.

Yet, Twitter almost never mentions music in its investor relations, suggesting that the music industry remains an ambiguous component of the network's short- and long-term growth. In addition, the company’s previous attempts to build tools tailored for music creators and consumers, from a standalone discovery app called #Music to a data partnership with indie record label 300 Entertainment, have either fizzled out or have yet to prove their effectiveness and ability to scale.

A strange contradiction has emerged: while Twitter is one of the most prominent hubs of influence in music, a series of failed product experiments has compelled some thought leaders to write that “music is the missing piece” in Twitter’s growth strategy. How did we arrive at this confusion? Amidst financial struggles and a seemingly continuous executive exodus, what steps is Twitter taking to reassert its proactive role in driving forward innovation and engagement in the music industry?

UNDERSTANDING THE RISE, FALL AND UNCERTAIN FUTURE OF #MUSIC

Twitter’s assertive positioning as a music-industry partner can be traced back to April 18, 2013, the day that the #Music discovery app was launched. The social network had bought music discovery startup We Are Hunted the previous year, and built the acquisition into a standalone, Twitter-branded platform where users could explore both overarching, real-time music trends (via the “Popular” tab) and emerging artists and songs from their own social graph (via the “Suggested” and “#NowPlaying” tabs). Positive reactions to #Music were similar to the praise that users often give today to products like Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist or Pandora’s algorithmic radio: while unconventional, the app had high potential as a comprehensive tool for surfacing emerging artists, tailored both to the tastes of individual users and the growth goals of A&R executives.

Yet, #Music was shut down exactly one year after its launch. Perhaps most compelling in retrospect are the reactionary headlines, which were simultaneously declarative about the app's death and confused about the lack of fanfare (“Twitter #Music Died Because No One Even Knew It Existed” / “Twitter To End Its Music App, Which Never Made Much Noise”).

In fact, this lack of anticipation and awareness points precisely to why #Music failed. Twitter is driven by fluid, real-time conversation; directing users to a Twitter-branded experience outside of Twitter fundamentally cuts off that conversation , while fragmenting what could be a smooth, seamless music consumption experience.

"What we found was that music fans really wanted to discuss music, rather than just discover it,” says Twitter’s Head of Music Partnerships Sunil Singhvi, who worked on the #Music app leading up to its launch, in an interview with Forbes. “The statistical list of trending artists was hugely interesting, but people quickly wanted to get back into Twitter to talk about it." In other words, users prioritized discussion and immediacy over discovery—or, rather, preferred to engage in discussion as a means of discovery in itself.

NEXT STEPS: SOME SUCCESS, MORE UNCERTAINTY

Yet, as the Twitter Music account declared in a tweet, the experimentation did not stop there. Only a few months later, in August 2014, boutique design studio Twofold unveiled a beautiful prototype of a redesigned Twitter artist page. Using rapper Mac Miller as an example, the page used a block design to highlight the bold imagery around an artist’s persona, placing photos and videos more in the foreground alongside individual tweets. Unfortunately, it seems like this redesign never thrived beyond Twofold's website, and there have been no publicized plans to build a standalone or revamped Twitter music product ever since.

In fact, some of Twitter's most successful music partnerships today, including streaming Audio Cards with SoundCloud and Spotify and native content partnerships with publishers like Genius and Stereogum, make no changes to the network's existing aesthetic. The hope is that these partnerships not only compel artists and tastemakers to get more invested in tweeting, but also deliver more value to viewers and incentivize more sharing within the Twitter ecosystem. While unexpected, Twitter’s investment in smart-headphone startup Muzik earlier this year also falls under this goal of making real-time music sharing as seamless as possible. (In a recent statement, Twitter clarified that this internal change has led to an overall increase in investment in commerce, by focusing more on DPAs.)

Meanwhile, the tasks of compiling and tracking music trends on Twitter have been allocated mostly to third-party sites, such as Billlboard’s  Trending 140 and Emerging Artists lists and music blog aggregator Hype Machine’s Twitter chart. In addition, less than a week after Twitter announced its Audio Cards, wearables company Jawbone released a mobile app called Drop that allows users to create playlists by tweeting; the launch was relatively low-key, and the product seems not to have gained much traction compared to other streaming and playlisting services in the market.

Rumors even spread in 2014 that Twitter would acquire SoundCloud, but the deal was dropped, and for good reason. Given the lofty licensing fees that dominate streaming services' financials, Twitter, whose revenue missed market expectations last quarter, would not benefit from having another struggling company under its wing while still trying to prove its own worth to investors. The rumor was not completely unfounded, however; both Twitter and SoundCloud are backed by Union Square Ventures, and former board member Peter Chernin (who just departed as of the company’s shareholder meeting last week) had previously invested in SoundCloud through his investment firm The Chernin Group.

In fact, the departure of arguably the most music-minded executive at Twitter—Nathan Hubbard, Head of Global Media and Commerce and former CEO of Ticketmaster—should be an alarming wake-up call for the company's music strategy. Hubbard had hoped to bring the immediacy and emotional drive of a ticket purchase to Twitter's user base, and was behind the launch of social commerce features like product pages and the native "Buy" button. Unfortunately, product development on both features ceased last Wednesday, and Twitter's commerce team has disbanded and merged with its customer service and dynamic product ad (DPA) divisions.

The higher-level reasoning behind the failure of these features relates to the downfall of the #Music app: they detract from the core Twitter experience by averting attention to commerce instead of interaction, discussion and ideas, even while still remaining embedded in the timeline. "There's a self-regulating process that happens on Twitter, which is if you're alienating your followers, they're going to leave,” Hubbard told Billboard in 2014. "It's the same approach that Twitter has taken as a whole with native advertising; we had to find ways to bring advertising into the platform in a way that enhances the experiences, and doesn't detract from it." With Hubbard leaving the company, the need to find an effective solution, or even an alternative, to the social commerce dilemma becomes even more urgent.

BY STEPPING BACK, TWITTER HELPS ARTISTS MOVE FORWARD

Today, Twitter’s in-house music team includes experts in a variety of genres, from hip-hop and EDM to rock and pop, and maintains a flexible yet close relationship with artists rather than building standalone tools for them. According to Singhvi, the team works with artists of all career stages to strategize around best practices for using Twitter to engage with fans, whether through teasing album lyrics, promoting tour info or hosting Q&As and polls.

In fact, while Twitter may fall short in developing products tailored for the music industry, the social network's music strategy certainly wins in providing a blank canvas for artists in the creative process. There is no one right way of using Twitter; some artists use the platform aggressively as a promotional tool, while others use the network to spark discussion around higher-level or non-musical ideas like politics, cooking or science. Twitter's value proposition lies simply in the possibility for detached, higher-level discussion, as opposed to networks in the realm of Facebook and Instagram that tend to center more directly around the artists' professional lives. Once Twitter paints on its own blank canvas, or directs users to a more restricted one (with a #Music app, for example), people recognize the lack of freedom and will leave.

Artists looking to succeed on Twitter need to embrace this blank canvas and express the full spectrum of their personality, instead of just pushing out promotional material. A great piece of advice comes from AKA, the first South African musician to reach more than one million Twitter followers, who attributes his social-media success to nothing else other than “keeping it real.” Scaling the notion of "keeping it real" requires not just unfiltered authenticity, but also regular interaction with fans and colleagues alike.

"If you're a young or emerging artist just starting out on Twitter and you only talk about yourself, it's very difficult to break out and reach new audiences,” explains Singhvi. “Some of the best practices for leveraging Twitter include interacting with colleagues in the industry and getting involved in the conversations and causes that you care about, and that are bigger than what you do day-to-day."

While the ease of artist-to-artist interaction on Twitter sometimes leads to highly publicized feuds, the vast majority of these interactions are positive and mutually beneficial, and give fans otherwise impossible access to celebrities' minds. Twitter has often stepped in to facilitate these conversations through scheduled Q&As with influential figures like Jay-Z, 300 Entertainment founder Kevin Liles, and the artists at Coachella.

Again, Twitter's strength lies in making these fluid conversations among strangers and across hierarchies possible in the first place, while other social media platforms tend to embed more friction into the networking process. It is because of these renewed possibilities that Twitter has heightened cultural clout among avid music listeners. "Fans often talk about how a Retweet is more valuable to them than an autograph,” says Singhvi. “A one-to-one Twitter interaction has a certain cultural relevance and significance above something you could just buy online."

THE SHIFT IN SOCIAL MEDIA'S CREATIVE SIDE FROM MUSIC TO VIDEO

Despite the shift of its music strategy toward facilitating close interactions with artists, Twitter is still fundamentally a social network, not a music website. As a result, Twitter seems to have bucketed music with film, TV and other forms of media and entertainment, rather than giving music the special treatment that it arguably deserves. Facebook's relationship with music is similar: the Music on Facebook page seems largely promotional rather than exploratory or conversational, and other creator tools and tips are consolidated on a page entitled Facebook Media (it is perhaps worth noting here that media.twitter.com, like music.twitter.com, also redirects to the general Twitter blog).

In fact, whether to perform better as a social network or to appeal more to investors, nearly all social music discovery apps either die out or strive to escape being pigeonholed as a music-only technology . For instance, one of the most renowned social music discovery apps, Crowdmix, is now trying to distance itself from its initial premise. "We chose music because it’s by far the most ubiquitous media form in the world. It’s a great common currency to start the conversation with, but it’s only a conversation starter," Crowdmix CMO Ted Mico told Pivotl last week. "It’s not a music social network at all.”

On the other hand, music-related initiatives in video have largely succeeded. One of Twitter’s few successful musical launches in recent years lies not on its own timeline, but rather on its video-sharing subsidiary Vine. Music has come to play an integral role in short-form video culture, whether as fertile ground for breaking independent artists like Shawn Mendes or as background music or even the punch line in fan-generated content. Vine decided to highlight this influence by launching a specialized Music on Vine page in August 2015 (which, unlike music.twitter.com, still thrives to this day). YouTube also has an active, regularly-updated page called YouTube For Artists that features not only a real-time chart of trending musicians and videos, but also visual tutorials for artists on how to maximize revenue and engagement on their YouTube content. The relatively greater exposure and longevity of these two pages compared to Twitter Music suggests that creator tools are better suited for video platforms, rather than for primarily text-based networks.

In terms of business, the video strategy also has measurable benefits for Twitter’s marketing and advertising partners. According to the company's Q1 earnings call, Twitter marketers that moved into video saw an 18% lift in awareness and a nearly 30% lift in message association or ad association versus traditional promoted tweets; a recent promoted video campaign with an unnamed beverage manufacturer demonstrated a 500% return on investment. “Promoted video performs incredibly well,” Bain stated during the earnings call. “With that type of ROI, we are going to continue to move people through video.”

Indeed, focusing on video plays to all of Twitter's strengths: the power of the blank canvas, "the energy of the live moment," the empowerment of artists to express both themselves and their cultural value to the world. Yet, it still seems inadequate to abandon new musical products and push the spotlight away from the constantly evolving blank canvas that is musical culture and conversation, which seems to erupt faster and with greater depth on Twitter than on any other platform. Like all successful technology companies, Twitter should experiment even more with products that prove its musical prowess, and continue asserting its role as a cultural touchpoint for music enthusiasts beyond its often-cluttered feeds. #Music may not have succeeded, but its distinctive mission should live on.