Twitter just launched a new tip jar feature with greater potential for musicians than those launched on popular streaming services such as Spotify and SoundCloud last year.
A new tip jar
Twitter started rolling out its new tip jar functionality last week. The functionality, which for now is only available to a limited group of creators, allows people to add Bandcamp, Cash App, Patreon, PayPal and Venmo to their profiles via a new button on their profiles. It’s a bit like a ‘link in bio’, but specifically for payments.
show your love, leave a tip
now testing Tip Jar, a new way to give and receive money on Twitter đ¸
Streaming platforms are not creator services. They focus on monetizing the catalogue-listener relation through ads and subscriptions rather than the artist-fan relation. That means the user experience on streaming services is geared towards what people expect in exchange for their payment: quick access to the music they know, new music, and being able to find ‘music for every moment’.
I’m not entirely sure how these services defined success for the donation feature, but especially Spotify needed a PR win over the past year, so I’m interpreting their silence over the feature as an indication that nothing significant is happening through there. As a matter of fact, it seems that in its newly designed desktop profiles, the feature has been quietly removed. For reference, compare Marshmello‘s profile on mobile and the new desktop UI.
Why Twitter is better positioned for tipping
Social media is where people connect to artists. You may listen to dozens of artists per month, even hundreds, but the commitment of a social media follow is something reserved for those you actually care about. Social media is primarily about what’s new and while you can scroll back into someone’s history, it’s a secondary use case when compared to seeing months or years-old ‘content’ appear on playlists.
Through social media, it’s easier than on streaming services to stay connected with people and introduce them to new ways to support you. By creating a Tip Jar that also includes things like Bandcamp and Patreon, Twitter is reducing the distance between a person being interested in something and actually purchasing it. Any friction in that journey causes drop-offs along the way, so any reduction of friction or journey length translates to real money for creators (see also: merch integrations in (live)streaming platforms).
Expect others to follow suit
The type of direct monetization offered through Twitter’s Tip Jar is part of a wider trend that can also be seen in livestreaming services, the surging popularity of Patreon and OnlyFans, Clubhouse‘s tipping feature, and even the donation buttons in music streaming services.
Twitter will not be the last service this year to roll out more monetization options.
Scams, fraud, bots and theft: the ugly side of streaming provides a stark contrast to that beautiful feeling of having the world’s recorded music at your fingertips.
What is Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)
You are already using 2FA. Certain accounts, like Google, Facebook, or Apple, require multiple forms of authentication in order to sign in from a new device. This often works by verifying it’s you from another device, or by entering a code sent to your phone number, email address, or generated in an authenticator app.
It adds a layer of security to accounts that makes it hard to get in with just the username and password.
Why don’t streaming services use 2FA?
Popular streaming services like Spotify and Netflix famously don’t use 2FA, although the latter has recently started running tests with it, presumably to tackle account sharing. The reason for not implementing 2FA? Likely because it doesn’t help growth and in fact may hamper conversion rates.
Jorge Castro on developer community dev.to sums it up well through this fictional conversation:
Developers: We want to implement 2FA in our platform.
Netflix executes: Ok, and how much will it cost us?
Developers: Around two months.
Netflix executives: Ok, and it will increase the number of viewers?
Developers: Well, not really. It is about security.
Netflix executives: So, it will not increase the number of viewers but it could be a burden for some customers and it could decrease the number of viewers.
Developers: Yes, but it could be optional.
Netflix executives: So optional, an option that it plays against the number of viewers and it will cost us time (and money). Sorry but no.
Developers: But the security.
Netflix executives: We already invested in our security. If our customers have trouble then we could reset its password. It’s their responsibility, not ours.
However building in a little more friction could be beneficial to all… and tackle certain types of fraud more efficiently than a switch to user-centric streaming payments might.
Black market for streaming service accounts
For years, there has been a thriving market for streaming service accounts, with Spotify accounts selling for under a dollar. Many though not all of these are hacked. It’s so common that people commenting on their hackers’ music tastes has become somewhat of a meme and a quick search on Twitter pulls up countless examples.
This is not an issue that is exclusive to Spotify and Netflix, but there’s a high availability of examples since they are two of the most popular entertainment services without 2FA.
Fake plays, scams, and fraud
Just like it’s possible to buy ‘fake followers’ on social media, it’s possible to buy fake plays for streaming services. Jacking up the numbers can help to game the recommendation algorithm and build fake legitimacy for those looking closely at big numbers (but perhaps not closely enough).
Who cares if that is what someone wants to do? Well, everyone should, because it eats away at the pool of money distributed to all artists. Hackers have been gaming this system openly since at least 2013 in order to generate revenue.
An article by William Bedell from 2015 explains how he was able to do the same. At the time, not only did Spotify not use 2FA:
“There wasn’t even a CAPTCHA or email verification when creating accounts.”
Image by William Bedell.
The lack of better security leads to these types of fraud having to be traced & fixed retroactively, which often leads to streaming services taking music with fake plays down. That sounds good, but there are two issues: 1) we don’t know what percentage of fraud goes undetected, and 2) this opens up an attack vector (want your competitor’s music taken down? Just boost it with fake streams).
Audius (primer article), a new streaming platform and protocol that awards people tokens (called $AUDIO) based on their participation, is also running into this issue. Bots are used on the platform to game the system and get music into the charts. This messes with the platform’s weekly reward system, as WeirdCityRecords on Reddit points out:
“Curators have been robbed by bot users almost every week since the rewards inception (not only in terms of $audio but engagement being buried below bots), and now with a song being clearly botted to #1, it seems like this week 1 artist or possibly more will be deprived as well.”
The track accused of being ‘botted’ to the top outperforms the #2 by over 14 times, despite the artist and account being new to the platform and seemingly not having a significant presence on other music platforms.
Two-factor authentication would make it a lot harder to create loads of accounts like in the examples above, especially if you limit to 1 account per phone number.
Report fraud
Recently, I became familiar with another scam. Unfortunately that was due to falling victim to it on Spotify, though it may also exist on other platforms.
Botnets get employed to report people’s playlists for inappropriate content. This results in the playlist title and description being taken down. Bada-bing bada-boom: it is now easier to be the #1 search result for those same terms on Spotify.
Hi Bas! Your playlists are targets of botted attacks that report your playlists with false motives to keep them from appearing in search results. These atracks are going on for many months now and Spotify still has not implemented a solution.
As soon as I reported the erroneous report to Spotify and had them restore the playlist title and description, the botnet took it down again. This repeated half a dozen times over 2 weeks with my playlist existing without a title or description for the majority of the time.
I’m not alone in this and have found various playlists that also seem to be suffering from this issue (click here for an example if you’re curious about Romanian Manele music and here for GTA’s excellent soundtrack). This thread in Spotify’s support forums has other users reporting the issue.
The attack seems to have ended, but I almost gave up restoring my playlist every time it got taken down (I did consider writing a script that would auto-reply to Spotify’s takedown emails, though).
Since playlists are user-generated content, Spotify needs some type of system to deal with reports and make sure content that goes against the terms & conditions is taken down. After the 5th time my playlist got taken down and I asked if they could protect my playlist from the next auto-takedown, I got this answer:
“All user-created content can be reported, and while it may be possible that a report is invalid, all such reports need to go through our official report channel so we can handle them properly.”
So that’s a no. This means that anyone building playlists on Spotify with an unverified account can fall victim to this. Sure, the reporting account may get banned, but if it’s a botnet targeting you that doesn’t matter. That’s problematic, because unlike my hobbyist playlist with 100 followers, there are curation brands and artists with playlists that depend heavily on Spotify. They’re all exposed to this type of attack that seems to rely on either hacked accounts or easily-created free accounts.
Investment without security
People around the world are putting hours of effort into their streaming accounts: building playlists, followings, brands and in some cases companies using their presence. They’re exposed to insecurity.
Even accounts on platforms with better security get hacked, e.g. to misuse the trust someone has built up and run a cryptocurrency scam on followers (as fellow music-tech writer Cherie Hurecently became a victim of on Twitter, which besides Audius and the report fraud above was my third prompt for writing this piece).
Even if a streaming service can reinstate an account after a hack: the hack can damage your brand, e.g. if the hacker changes playlist titles and imagery to something offensive or scams, or just makes it impossible for you to keep running your playlist brand due to repeated reporting. If you enjoy services’ algorithmic recommendations, a hacker’s temporary account takeover can mess that up for you also.
Two-factor authentication is a basic standard for security. Maybe it’s time for streaming services to give it some priority and prevent fraud, scams, and theft.
Here’s a little hack I use to share my Instagram photos to Twitter automatically.
Many years ago, Instagram decided to disable its Twitter cards integration, meaning photos posted to Instagram and then shared on Twitter, no longer showed up as an image but instead just as a descriptive text + link. It’s a common strategy for social startups to first leverage other platforms by making highly shareable content, and then slowly making content harder to share so that people spend more time on the platform itself (where the platform can actually monetize them through ads).
For years now, Twitter has steadily been growing into a visual service, instead of a service of status updates and link sharing, and tweets that include images getting higher engagement. Yet many still treat it as the service it once was.
Sharing to Twitter from Instagram with the app’s native functionality is near-pointless. It leads to very low engagement, and you’re typically better off manually making a photo post to Twitter. But why do the same thing twice if you can easily configure a solution where all you have to do is post to Instagram.
Step 1: register with IFTTT
IFTTT is a service that lets you connect different services and automate behaviours between them. The name of the service is an abbreviation of “If This, Then That”, meaning that if one thing occurs in one service, something else is triggered elsewhere.
In our case, that thing that occurs is you posting a photo to your Instagram account. What’s triggered elsewhere is that your Twitter account will post the Instagram photo as a native Twitter photo post with a link to the Instagram post.
Step 2: create a new applet on IFTTT
When you create a new applet, you’ll see the service’s formula structure explained before.
Click on +this and select Instagram. Connect your account, and then choose a trigger. If you only want to share specific posts to Twitter, you can do so through the use of a hashtag that you only use on specific posts. Since I only post every couple of days or less, I’m selecting “Any new photo by you” since I don’t see a need to limit what I’m sharing to Twitter.
In the next step, +that, you select Twitter, connect to the service, and then pick Post a tweet with image. You can customize the tweet text in case you want to add text to your tweets. Keep in mind that any text in the caption you use on Instagram will be abbreviated to make room for the other text. You will see this:
Click Add ingredient and select Url. This way, each time you post a photo from Instagram to Twitter, it actually links back to your original Instagram post, which may help people with placing comments, or converting your Twitter followers to Instagram followers.
The next field, Image URL, should read SourceUrl. SourceUrl is the direct link to the image on Instagram, and Twitter needs this link in order to repost the image. Changing this will break the applet.
Step 3: finish your applet
Think of a nice, easy-to-understand title for your applet and hit the Finish button. You can choose to get notifications each time your applet runs, which means you get notified each time a photo is posted from Instagram to Twitter.
Step 4: see if it works
When you go to My Applets,  you should see your applet. Here’s mine on the left:
When you click on it, it will open a bigger version of it. Click on the cogwheel and you get a screen to configure the recipe. I’ve cut up the screenshot, but if you’ve followed all the steps, you should see something like this:
Make a photo, post it on Instagram, and see if it works. (it may take a while for it to appear on your account)
An emerging void signals new opportunity for innovation in digital music.
The benefit of writing thoughts down is that you get to revisit them. Six years ago, I penned a piece for Hypebot called The Next MySpace. At that time, people in the music business were desperate to for another MySpace to emerge: the site had been a ray of hope, but as it collapsed, online music was scattered across an immature ecosystem of rapidly growing startups like Soundcloud, Bandcamp, Facebook, Spotify, and many others that were eventually acquired or perished and forgotten. I argued:
The closest we will ever get to a “next MySpace” will be either a music network or a social network that manages to gather, organise and integrate the fragments in spectacular fashion.
Defining the MySpace moment
What I call a MySpace moment is not when everything was going well for MySpace: it’s when decline set in. People started replacing MySpace’s music players, which sucked, with Soundcloud’s beautiful waveform players. People started moving much of their social lives to Facebook (for friends) and Twitter (to connect to strangers). Up until then, the dominant social network had been music-driven — people, especially teenagers, expressed their identities by making long lists of bands they liked.
From the ashes of MySpace, which never managed to recover, rose a new ecosystem of music startups. They’ve managed to make it easy for artists to connect to fans, get paid for online playback, let fans know about new shows, and be able to very specifically target people with ads.
That moment, that void, was a massive opportunity and many companies benefited from it.
That moment is here once again.
The new MySpace moment
There are two main factors contributing to a new emerging void for entrepreneurs to leap in. One has to do with product adoption life cycles, which I’ll explain below. The other has to do with the important position Soundcloud claimed in the online music ecosystem.
Soundcloud came closer to being the ‘next MySpace’ than any startup has. And let’s be blunt: the company is not doing well. After years of legal pressure to tackle the problem of works being uploaded to the service without rights holders’ permission, they were forced to adopt a service model that does not make sense for Soundcloud. The typical $10 a month subscription doesn’t make sense. People are on Soundcloud for the fresh content, the mixtapes, remixes, unreleased stuff: the things that will not be on Spotify for weeks or months (or ever!). Why inject the catalogue with music of long deceased people?
There have been reports that Soundcloud would consider any bids higher than the total amount of money invested into the company to date. That’s not a good sign. The road they’ve been forced into is a dead-end street, and the only end game is a quick acquisition.
I don’t think Soundcloud will die, but it is hard for the company to focus on what they’ve always been good at. Now that they’ve been forced into the Spotify model, those are the types of metrics that are going to matter. Subscriber numbers, conversion, retention. So it may struggle to do as good a job serving the audience they’ve traditionally serviced so well. (small note: I love Soundcloud, and the people there: prove me wrong!)
This leaves a vacuum.
Adding to that vacuum, is the fact that Spotify (and other streaming services) are looking beyond early adopters. To understand the phenomenon, have a look at the below graph:
The top part of the graph details the product life cycle. The bottom part explains the type of audience you address during the steps of that life cycle. As we’ve all noticed from the jubilant press reports on streaming’s expansion, we’re in the growth part of the cycle. This means services like Spotify and Apple Music have to get really good at targeting Early Majority and Late Majority type consumers.
If you’re reading this, you’re in the Innovator or Early Adopter segment. Startups typically start off by targeting those segments. So when Spotify moves on from Early Adopters (their de-emphasizing of user generated playlists is a big hint!), it leaves room for new startups to target and better serve those types of users.
Filling the new void
What happens then? Well, we’re going to get to the next phase of the digital music ecosystem – which is mobile-driven, and flirting with augmented reality, VR, and artificial intelligence. Early adopters are likely to keep paying for their Spotify subscriptions – it’s too big a convenience to give up… So entrepreneurs will have to figure out ways to monetize new behaviours.
Now is a great time to look at very specific problems in music. Don’t try to build the next Spotify or the next Soundcloud. For a while, everyone was trying to build the next MySpace — all those startups are dead now. Instead, take a specific problem, research it, build a solution for someone, test it, try it again for a broader group, and if it works: double down and scale up.
Repeating the same question over and over to cut through the nonsense and set the right priorities.
I regularly discuss digital strategy with bloggers, DIY musicians, managers or people running their own record label. My intention is to help people think more like startups, set clear goals, collect data and know how to act on data. There are useful frameworks for this, like the AARRR framework, but they take a while to get acquainted with.
Even in quick conversations, I want to give people something useful, uncomplicated. Youâre not going to be able to go through an entire framework with sets of metrics. When constructing narratives for brands, it helps to ask the question why? over and over. In digital strategy, this question is:
And then?
These two words wonât help you determine what to do, but they will help you validate your actions and uncover tasks that might need to be completed before acting. An example:
A Buddhist rapper, letâs call him Jimi Zendrix, desires to sell more merchandise. He knows that to do that, he needs to build a bond with his fans. He has the perfect solution: a newsletter.
And then? Jimi: then Iâm going to share what Iâm doing with my fans. And then? Jimi: then theyâre going to feel more engaged. And then? Jimi: then Iâll develop merch and link to it from my newsletter. And then? Jimi: then people are going to go there and buy the merch.
Each one of these answers reveals a set of tasks and extra questions.
How are you going to share what youâre doing with fans? Do you have time to prepare that every week? Are there easy ways to aggregate your social feeds like Instagram? Or do you need to use a different newsletter service for that?
How do you know that people feel more engaged? This means you have to make assumptions, before launching your newsletter, about open rates and click rates of fans. If theyâre really more engaged, you should also see it in the data in other places, so you need to have a way to track that.
How will you develop this merch? Can you use the data from your newsletter and other sources to develop better products? Whatâs the best way to display merch in mailinglists?
Can you track sales from when someone opens the email, clicks the link, looks around the site, to purchase? Are you using a merch shop that allows you to understand this and lets you optimize? For example, you may find that newsletter readers are more likely to buy hats. You may want to show hats first to people who click through from your newsletter, but not to normal visitors.
Loads of stuff to consider before launching your newsletter. Donât overwhelm yourself: the lesson is whatâs most important. Pick something you want to do, make an assumption, then test it. Repeat.
And then thereâs fallaciesâŚ
âAnd then?â doubles for âso what?â We often obsess with numbers called âvanity metricsâ, which are kind of pointless to focus on.
Try to imagine an answer for these:
I want 5,000 likes on Facebook. And then?
I want to have 1,000 visitors on my homepage. And then?
I want my tweets to be retweeted more. And then?
Your answers likely contain a hypothesis. You may think that getting more retweets leads to more followers leads to more fans leads to more sales. Now you have something to measure.
Do retweets lead to more followers? You may want to exclude spam accounts, or accounts that follow tens of thousands of users.
Do followers lead to more fans? How will you be able to tell?
Do those people who stumble upon your tweets eventually convert to paying customers?
Each of these have conversion ratios. So you go from a number to a much smaller number at the end. You may determine, before even getting started, that itâs not worth your time to research hashtags and write tweets that arenât even directly related to your music, just to get retweets.
âAnd then?â helps you cut through the bullshit and get your priorities straight. Donât spend too much time on things you canât measure or that are not part of a funnel.
Each step in your digital strategy needs to lead somewhere.
Since launching its chatbot API last April, Facebook’s Messenger platform has already spawned 11,000 bots. Bots are popular, because they allow brands to offer more personalized service to existing and potential customers. Instead of getting people to install an app or visit your website, they can do so from the comfort of their preferred platform, whether that’s WhatsApp, Messenger, Twitter or something else.
Bots, basically automated scripts with varying levels of complexity, are ushering a new wave of user experience design. Here are some of my favourite bots.
AutoTLDR – Reddit
AutoTLDR is a bot on Reddit that automatically posts summaries of news articles in comment threads. tl;dr is internet slang for “too long, didn’t read” and is often used at the top or bottom of posts to give a one-line summary or conclusion of a longer text. It uses SMMRY‘s API for shortening long texts.
The key to its success is Reddit’s digital darwinism of upvotes and downvotes. Good summaries by AutoTLDR can usually be found within the top 5 comments. If it summarizes poorly, you’re unlikely to come across its contribution.
Subreddits on Reddit center around certain topics or types of content. Subreddit Simulator is a collection of bots that source material from other Reddits and, often quite randomly, create new posts and material based on that. Its most popular post is sourced from the “aww” Subreddit and most likely sourced two different posts to create this:
Check out other top posts here. Again, the reason why it works well is because of human curation. People closely follow Subreddit Simulator and upvote remarkable outcomes, like the above.
wayback_exe – Twitter
Remember the internet when it had an intro tune? wayback_exe takes you back to the days of dial up and provides your Twitter feed with regular screenshots of retro websites. By now, it’s basically art.
It uses the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which has saved historic snapshots of websites.
pixelsorter – Twitter
If you’re into glitch art, you’ll love pixelsorter. It’s a bot that re-encodes images. You can tweet it an image and get a glitched out version back. Sometimes it talks to other image bots like badpng, cga.graphics, BMPbug, Lowpoly Bot, or Arty Bots. With amazing algorithmic results.
Generative Bot is one of those bots that makes you realize:Â algorithms are able to produce art that trumps 90% of all other art. It uses some quite advanced mathematics to create a new piece every 2 hours. Seeding your Twitter feed with occasional computer-generated bits of inspiration.
