Social media giant Twitter’s newly available service, Audio Card, will enable users to listen to audio directly on their timelines on both iOS and Android devices. Twitter will be partnering with several third parties, the first of which are Berlin-based digital music provider SoundCloud and iTunes, to bring music to tweeters. Users can enable the feature with a single tap while on Twitter, and they can dock the Audio Card, which will allow them to continue listening to audio as they are browsing within the Twitter app. In addition to musical artists such as Coldplay and Foo Fighters, who have shared music through the Twitter Audio Card, there have already been non-musical audio tweets from NASA, the Washington Post, the White House and the BBC World Service. Users of On SoundCloud, SoundCloud’s partner program that has been developed for artists and creators of all levels, will eventually be able to use Twitter Audio Card for their posts, as well.
This is not the first time that Twitter has tried to include music with its features and to become a multimedia network, perhaps to compete more directly with Facebook. In 2013, it launched the #Music app, which used Twitter activity and tweets to determine popular tracks and emerging artists. Users could then follow a link to listen to these songs from these tracks and artists. Most users did not find this convenient, nor did they necessarily want to listen to the same material as that of their followers. Twitter’s new partnership with SoundCloud—a company Twitter was once interested in buying—should be a more successful attempt because it will make streaming music much more convenient for Twitter users and because users will be able to listen to audio from personal friends, not just known artists or media.
Bringing this new media into Twitter’s text-heavy platform will not only be a good move for the social networking service, but it could also result in greater revenues for mobile operators as users spend longer amounts of time on Twitter because of the new content that it will be able to provide.
The above item appeared in a recent issue of The Tarifica Alert, a weekly resource that analyzes noteworthy developments in the telecoms industry from around the world. To access all of the latest articles and issues: http://www.tarifica.com/TarificaAlert.aspx
No comments:
Post a Comment