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Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

>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.)

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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.

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.

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.

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