Twitter Music will integrate Spotify, Rdio, iTunes, Soundcloud, Vevo and Youtube | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Music will integrate Spotify, Rdio, iTunes, Soundcloud, Vevo and Youtube

sefsar.com

97 pointsyoussefsarhan53 comments

>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.)

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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

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)

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.

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...)

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

Soundcloud is pretty big too.

I, too, am reminded of a frog being asked by the scorpion to help it across the river, when it comes to companies like Twitter.

Would that be a bad thing? i assume that the point of twitter music is that somebody you follow shares a song, and twitter music lets you listen to that song no matter which service it is on. If twitter wants to pay for licenses so i can listen to the music my friends are sharing, what do i care if they drop support for RDIO?

Using the analogy of the current state of Twitter clients, I'd suggest that the possibility of Twitter taking away the option to easily use/link-to services that offer a better user experience is plausible, saying that they no longer add "unique value" to the Twitter platform.

edit: The warning signal should probably be louder for the partner providers though.

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.

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

Musicbrainz.org has been assigning unique IDs for tracks, albums and artists for about a decade. Its community built and has insane coverage. They are used in spotify's API as one example.

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.

I use Spotify as my primary music listening service and their music discovery is terrible. I'll gladly listen to Spotify through Twitter if it means better charts of new music, popular music, etc.

Use Spotify for music library management and access across all platforms. Use Pandora for music discovery.

Problem solved!

+1 for pandora. +2 for waffles.fm and what.cd ;)

What is what.cd?

A private BitTorrent tracker for music.

My dream wish is if someone could make a Pandora-like app ( both of in terms of functionality and quality) built on top of Spotify. I know spotify offers some API but don't know if this would be possible.

IIRC Pandora has a catalog size of about 1 million vs ~20 million for Spotify and yet they have been able to do a superb job in song recommendations. I find Spotify radio to be pretty terrible at this.

It exists for mobile - SpotOn Radio. Powered by Spotify and Echonest. You need a premium Spotify account but it's a super slick experience.

http://spoton-radio.com/

Last time I checked, Pandora's catalog was far too limited to be valuable to me for discovery. It was easy to come up with a half a dozen artists I like that Pandora had no clue about.

To me the word "discovery" means finding unknown works, not simply another way to listen to an artist who is already well established.

Pandora for discovery is a nonstarter, at least for me.

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

We haven't even seen the service yet. I think there will be a lot more human curation than algorithmic discovery.

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

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?

I am not sure if I would say algorithmic music discovery have failed but yes, I would pick curation over algorithms any day. It just gives me more context.

There is a group of highly dissatisfied users (like me) who have found that current solutions are really inadequate. You'll have to trust me on this.

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.

take a look at grooveshark its the best social music experience I've had

They also act like dicks and don't pay artists. :(

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57332246-261/grooveshark-e...

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/101311cc

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/120405grooves...

Hey everyone. I made the site http://www.redditunes.com. I'll be honest, there are some major flaws but you should check it out sometime if you want to try something different!

>I fail to see how this could possibly fit into my use case for Twitter

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.

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.

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 ?

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.

KEXP has some nice music podcasts

The BBC's "In Our Time" [1], a weekly discussion of history, science, literature, culture -- brilliantly moderated by Sir Melvyn Bragg. Effortlessly intelligent and always entertaining.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl

I have a show called Product People: great products and the people who build them (software, apps, ebooks). http://productpeople.tv

Also highly recommend: Startups for the Rest of Us.

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).

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.

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.

They are never going to be everything for everyone as long as they hitch their fortunes to the old licensing regime, in which case this group is more of a trade organization for rate negotiations.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Obviously this is just the beginning.

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com