Why Twitter Is Getting Into the Music Discovery Business

Twitter billed its foray into music discovery as a mechanism to "surface songs people are tweeting about." Yet Twitter doesn't actually plan to make any money off of the music itself. So why bother?

In a word, advertising. Twitter hopes that Music will get people to stay longer on the platform and to get users to reveal more about themselves for better targeting.

The former addresses a major weakness for Twitter. As the following graph shows, Twitter is far behind Facebook on time spent:

Twitter has been working hard over the past couple of years to increase the metric by fashioning itself as a media hub. Clark Fredricksen, VP at eMarketer, says that now Twitter "wants to be a place where people find new things. The launch of Music is a logical extension of that." Giving users a reason to visit Twitter more and stay on longer provides more advertising opportunities Read more...