to twitter or not to twitter, that is the question

An interesting discussion on the pros/cons of musicians promoting themselves on twitter sprung up over on the Ableton Live forum about a month ago, so I had to interject.

So I’ll give my (biased) $0.02.

For me, Twitter is the way I want to communicate.

I do most of my daily “computing” on my iPhone, which primarily consists of connecting with my friends and staying up on the news.

I want all of this info in short, succinct bursts because I’m on the run, I’m looking at a small screen, and I’m on a relatively low bandwidth internet connection. I like that Twitter forces folks to be brief.

I follow my friends, several news agencies, and a couple of bands that I dig. When used in this way, it almost makes checking Facebook, my Google Reader RSS feed, and MySpace pages redundant. Twitter is the closest thing to the real-time web, and is an excellent tool for spotting trends and breaking news.

Of course there is always a need for long-form info. I want to be able to read an in-depth analysis or blog post. And if the info is important, one can link to it on Twitter using one of the many URL shorteners.

I won’t touch on the amount of crap on Twitter and Facebook. Just like every media channel, there is a lot of garbage. There are countless bad videos on YouTube, 100s of worthless cable TV channels, and endless garbage blog posts. I’ve probably written a few myself.

What’s important about Twitter and social media in general is that it levels the playing field. The tech is out there to record and produce amazing music at an affordable price. Write your song, put it out there, and if it is good, folks will share it. There are so many great ways to find good media now, and so many tools at a musician’s disposal, it really comes down to what makes sense for you and your fans.

I wanted to share my music on Twitter and I also wanted to make sure my music would play on smartphones. So I built http://bln.kr to let me do that. It’s in beta and if any folks are interested, I would love to get feedback on how to make it better.

The conversation is here:

http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=114138&p=897191&hilit=+twitter#p897191

musings on mobile multimedia

Here’s a repost from my personal blog from a couple months ago that I think fits with the spirit of what we are trying to do with bln.kr.

It’s interesting to me how the medium shapes the media. Radio gave us newshours. TV gave us half-hour sitcoms. The web gave us blogs and YouTube. What is the mobile medium and what does the media look like?

Obviously mobile media is succinct. It needs to fit on small screens, fit into passing moments, and travel on constrained bandwidth.

Yet as much as mobile media is constrained, it is also uniquely advantaged. Mobile media is social and intensely personal. Only mobile knows who your friends are, how you like to connect to information, what media you consume, where you are, where you go, and your patterns of behavior.

Mobile media can leverage this to create experiences that cannot be replicated across any other platform. And mobile has to leverage all of this to be a distinct medium.


I think the mobile medium is Twitter. Short and social, challenging in its limitations and boundless in its possibilities.


If the web is democratic media, then mobile + twitter is like forming our own republics. Follow your friends and preferred news sources and you could potentially get all your news and entertainment from your Twitter stream. In this scenario, the concept of user-generated vs. traditional media is a mute point. Why isn’t ABC just another user, uploading their latest episode of LOST just as easily as I upload a new mp3 of a jam? Create a level playing field for content, distribute it socially, and let the best content win.


Somewhat-related thoughts as I geek out on “the future.”

Let’s say I check Twitter on my phone and @ABC has posted a new Lost episode. I’m home and I click play and the TV turns on and now I’m watching the newest episode of Lost via IPTV on my home 100” OLED. My Twitter streams automatically tells my friends what I’m watching and their comments about the episode get superimposed on the screen. I can choose to watch the Pop-Up video version, with facts about the show popping up from the Lostepedia website. During a commercial break, a Google Maps ad shows me all the bars in the area that are doing a Lost viewing and let’s me know that my buddy is there.

So I call my buddy. Lost automatically stops playing. I’m going to meet up, so I jump on the train and keep watching. The video is automatically compressed to stream to my 4G phone. I don’t have headphones plugged in, so closed captioning automatically turns on. During a commercial break, Ben’s new jam session that he recorded and uploaded to http://bln.kr automatically plays. I dig it, so I purchase it. It downloads to my home server, which is of course mirrored on my phone. Sensing where I am via GPS, another commercial plays for a local bar.

I get to the bar, and I have my phone set to discover the media preferences of like-minded folks. My phone recognizes that I’m in a bar full of people watching Lost, so it starts scanning their mp3 collections.

On the way home, I check out some of the suggested MP3s. I really dig one, so I find the artist on bln.kr and share the track. Now every time someone from my Twitter stream listens to it, I get a tiny advertising credit, which I can then use to purchase other content I find.

I notice that there is a color e-ink poster for a new movie coming out. I scan the poster and the trailer starts playing. It looks pretty awesome, so I share the trailer to my twitter stream and then buy tickets, using up the credits I earned from my previous shares.

I think I will stop here for now, but you get the point.