David Emery Online

Twitter Music

2 February 2009

I’d like to start today by relaying a snippet of a conversation on twitter:

richtlobf: So: FatCatRecords have signed up today What other indies do we need on here? 4AD, Bella Union, Jagjag and Secretly Canadian would be sweet

me: @richtlobf I’m not sure labels should really be on twitter – isn’t it better that artists are, as opposed to companies with product to sell?

Twitter has seen a massive surge in the last few months – particularly in the UK thanks to @stephenfry no doubt. I’ve seen my followers surge to 334, which is faintly ridiculous – more people follow me on twitter then subscribe to the RSS feed for this site (about 200-ish, for anyone who’s curious).

It’s not just me that’s seen a noticeable uptake. We set up – after many conversations along the lines of “trust us, it’s the next big thing” – a twitter account for Jack Peñate 2 years ago. It worked for a time – we were really using it to enable him to txt to his site, which worked great – but as with all these things if you’re not using these things for yourself, but being coerced to by someone else it died out after a while. I’m sure their will be people reading who’ve tried to get other people blogging, which can quite rapidly turn into blood-from-stone extraction if they’re not a natural blogger – twitter is much the same thing.

When we left it, back in August 2007, I think Jack had about 30 odd followers – not exactly a huge amount, but a nice number to have some fun with (we premiered the Torn On The Platform video to them before anyone else via direct message, for example). It’s now grown to over 200, with about 50 coming in the last couple of months of last year and the rest in the last few weeks.

I think Twitter has the potential to work really nicely for artists that naturally engage with it. Take Colin Meloy, the lead singer from The Decemberists, for example. He’s only recently got on Twitter – like many – but he’s quite obviously taken to it like a duck to. It’s interesting, and works in the same way everyone else I follow ‘works’ – he’s just a guy posting interesting things and ‘what he’s doing’.

Bjork is a great counter example. @bjork is not Bjork, and is instead a combined feed of news from her website coupled with (presumably) automated ‘thanks for following me’ messages. It is pretty much the antithesis of what makes Twitter work. It’s not – generally – an announcement mechanism, it’s a communication and conversation mechanism.

Twitter is not an RSS reader.

It’s very obvious that Twitter has now reached a critical mass large enough to get on every digital marketing plan – ‘oh we must get one of those Twitter sites’ – but it misses the fairly key point that it’s a person-to-person communication medium. You can’t exactly marketing-plan that, can you?

So that takes me back to Twitter versus Record Labels. For the most part, it just doesn’t make sense for a label to be on Twitter. If you’re of any reasonable size it’s either going to end up as a regurgitated news RSS feed, or the Twitters of the one person at the label that wanted to do it in the first place. Which is fine, actually, but surely it would just be better to be you, rather then the label? A group of people from a label hanging out on Twitter and talking would be far better then some odd group feed that has the subtext of promotion behind it?

Wichita’s Twitter is a good example – it’s slightly uncomfortable because it’s fairly obviously just one person posting, but it’s anonymous and mixed in with the expected ‘marketing’ tweets (e.g. “First Aid Kit are on Steve Lamacq’s Rebel playlist this week – get your vote in here…http://tinyurl.com/2cnm37”). Wouldn’t it be much better to use your real name – maybe get all you staff on there if you like – and aggregate them on your site if you really feel the need?

It reminds me very much of the time when Facebook started getting popular and no one quite knew how to ‘market’ on it – should an artist be a group? A person with friends? Luckily Facebook came along and created musicians pages which act in the double role of a) giving marketers somewhere to do their job and tick the boxes on their “social network coverage” plan and b) making it very easy to ignore and get on with using Facebook for what we want to use it for.

Twitter does indeed appear to be – finally – the next big thing, but that doesn’t mean it’s a digital marketing frontier that needs to be conquered.