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Twitter To Provide Music Data Through Deal With Lyor Cohen's New Company
February 3, 2014 at 3:58 AM (PT)
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TWITTER has partnered with LYOR COHEN's new company -- 300 ENTERTAINMENT -- to provide information to the music business based on TWITTER data. COHEN made the partnership public YESTERDAY (2/2) at MIDEM, the annual music industry conference in CANNES, FRANCE.
“There was a time not so long ago when we sold music to retailers and they sold to fans, but nobody knew who those fans were,” THE NEW YORK TIMES quotes COHEN as explaining. "I’ve spent most of my life not knowing who the customer is. Isn’t that a shame?”
THE TIMES notes, "The reading of music’s digital tea leaves has become a big business as companies like GRACENOTE, NEXT BIG SOUND and MUSICMETRIC have joined traditional players like NIELSEN in providing information about music online. But while music is the most popular topic on TWITTER -- users discussed it in more than one billion messages last year -- its depths have not been fully plumbed."
The focus of the project will be to mine the TWITTER data for information users are sharing about things like a new song or fledgling band.
"For TWITTER, a successful music partnership could also help it prove its value to musicians beyond its well-known uses for communication and self-promotion," notes THE TIMES. "Last year the company introduced a music app to wide fanfare, but it failed to catch on and within months faded into relative obscurity. BOB MOCZYDLOWSKY, TWITTER’s head of music, said that once 300 ENTERTAINMENT combed through its data and helped develop analysis tools, it would make the information available to others in the music world, a process that he said might take a few months. TWITTER’s data, he said, can sometimes be best culled by outside parties with specific goals."
“If you think of data as a product,” MOCZYDLOWSKY said, “having a customer who needs to make a decision will help us organize that data much better than if we tried to do it ourselves.”

