David Emery OnlineTwitter Drops The Ecosystem Hammer: Don’t Try To Compete With Us On Clients
Specifically, Platform lead Ryan Sarver has a fairly lengthy outline of Twitter’s line of thinking with regard to third-party clients and services. And while there’s a little bit of dancing around the topic at first, it quickly gets very clear: third-parties shouldn’t be creating straight-up Twitter clients any further.
There’s no doubt this is a very disappointing move from Twitter, considering you can’t find a company that has its success more routed in external developers and APIs. Presumably this is linked to the fact that Twitter has been promising advertising (in the form of promoted tweets and trends) in 3rd party clients to its advertisers to launch in Q2 2011; to be able to guarantee it they have to have tight control over those clients, and this is the start of that.
This seems like a major misstep; surely they can generate enough revenue from the mainstream users using the official clients (including twitter.com) not to have to resort to this?
Visit ➔It Started With A Click: How to Spawn A Viral Hit
This think tank will inform and inspire those looking to understand how to make music go viral over social media. Lifting the lid and debunking dogma about how to create a viral hit, this illustrated session will combine panel-led debate with open round table discussion providing all with pointers, next step suggestions and an eye on how music will broken in the future.
Come and hear me witter on in person about all this music marketing malarky on Thursday. Hopefully I will have figured out by then how on earth you do make a “viral” hit…
Visit ➔Island Def Jam Partners With The Echo Nest To Create Opportunities For Developers
In what the companies are calling the first-ever alliance between a major label and the independent app developer community, Island Def Jam and The Echo Nest are partnering to make the label’s catalog available to developers who employ The Echo Nest’s API. [...] As part of this agreement, the label is rendered the publisher of the app, giving it control over distribution and making it privy to a portion of the revenue (the rest goes to the dev and The Echo Nest). In turn, IDJ will market the app and pay music publishers when need be.
Amazing work here – use Island Def Jam’s API and they effectively own your app. I can’t see any serious developer being interested in this.
The idea of being able to access label data through an API is an interesting one – we’re actually mid way through developing one ourself – but I wonder how interesting it is when it’s on a label by label basis; most of the time you’re going to want a much larger range of content I would have thought.
Visit ➔British Sea Power plans Kinect-augmented webcast
Post-punk naturalists British Sea Power will be commandeering the Roundhouse in London at the end of the month to record a webcast enhanced by augmented reality, provided by a hacked Kinect sensor.
Something we’ve put together at work which should be pretty interesting – you can tune in here on Monday night at 9pm.
Visit ➔The REAL Death Of The Music Industry
10 years ago the average American spent almost 3 times as much on recorded music products as they do today.
26 years ago they spent almost twice as much as they do today.
An interesting article with lots of lovely graphs, but makes the mistake of lumping the whole of the industry together as one. Sales of certain types of albums are dropping massively, but that’s certainly not true for everything (and there’s plenty of money to made from recorded music, you just have to be smart about it).
Visit ➔experimenting with a second screen
I've had a rare weekend of telly. And instead of just lounging on the sofa (well, as well as just lounging on the sofa) I thought I'd see how the experience is changed by a slightly different sort of second screen. Not the usual twitter on iPad fiddling, but a little pico projector beaming Dextr next to the telly.
This is interesting. Not fully formed yet, but there’s something in this whole ‘second screen’ thing.
Visit ➔Foo Fighters - White Limo
I’d given up a while ago that the Foo Fighters could do anything other than middle of the road rawk, but they’ve conclusively proven me wrong.
Visit ➔fuck you, scalpers. terminal 5 shows added.
we tried calling our lawyer about the ticket scalping. “it’s legal”. no joke. it’s fucking legal. i tramped around with friends and band getting insane. i wanted to buy some expensive tickets and then track the seller down to beat him. i acted stupid. i did some classic, shakespearean vain “fist shaking”, etc. i made angry tweets. (i’m wondering now what on earth could be less effective and more of a first-world spoiled idiotic move than “angry tweets”? jesus.)
James Murphy Is Awesome (go read the whole thing, please).
Visit ➔The Strokes - Under Cover of Darkness
Turns out the new Strokes track is (surprisingly, for a band that’s been away for so long) really good. Takes about 3 listens to get into, though: