The announcement earlier this week that Twitter would discontinue its unpopular #music app seemed like an indication that the social media site might be scaling back its commitment to music. On the contrary, they seem to be regrouping, and looking at ways of approaching it from a different angle. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Twitter is in talks with a variety of music companies, like the streaming service Beats Music and Vevo and Sony Music Entertainment, in hopes of better integrating music into the user experience.
That all makes sense, as music is clearly one of the most talked about subjects on Twitter. But there’s a tossed-off factoid that comes with every story written about the site’s popularity that starts off any discussion about music on Twitter on shaky ground. As a story about a newly announced deal with Billboard to create charts that rank discussion of music on Twitter in the New York Times points out, seven out of its top ten most popular accounts are musicians. Of the top 100, that number includes 41 musicians.
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The sheer number of followers many of these stars have accumulated, like Katy Perry, in the top spot with nearly 52 million, followed closely behind by Justin Bieber at 50.5 and Lady Gaga at 41, (with Barack Obama, whose sophomore album has been roundly panned by critics, coming in third with 42.2), are hard to deny – until they’re not (more on that in a minute). But does the fact that popular celebrities are popular on Twitter actually tell us anything about Twitter, or does it merely tell us that popular celebrities are popular anywhere they go?
Celebrating the fact that musicians like these are among Twitter’s most followed seems like it “Means Something,” but it’s actually antithetical to what Twitter is supposed to represent. Music stars may be the most popular accounts on Twitter, but they also happen to be, for the most part, bad Twitter users.
Even worse, they’re bad actors on Twitter.
As numerous looks into the veracity of the number of Twitter followers among the top accounts have found, a significant percentage of them are fake. According to Gizmodo, 78% of Katy Perry’s followers are either fake, or inactive accounts. That number gets even worse for Taylor Swift, 53% of whose followers are fake, and 28% of whom are inactive. It’s a trend that persists across the rest of the top ten.
Hardly laudable emblems of a service. Even if all of their followers were real, the way they interact with them would still be problematic. The chief innovation of Twitter, and its major draw, as most who use it frequently will attest, is not its ability to serve as a distributor of information from celebrities and the like. Instead, it’s the democratizing integration of news and reactions; “join the conversation,” in other words. The average user is no longer just a receiver of news and updates, we’re the facilitators of the news distribution, and can find ourselves tossed into the mix with the celebrities, newsmakers, and thinkers of our particular choosing. Or we can just talk about them with like-minded friends, (or argue about them with enemies, as is often the case in my circles).
Considering the way the most popular musician accounts use Twitter, it seems a disavowal of its very spirit. Many of them can barely even be considered users of Twitter in any meaningful sense. They’re merely glitzy squatters who’ve propped up a sign on a digital storefront and come around every now and again to gawk at the line waiting outside.
Consider Adele, the 21st most popular account, with nearly 20 million followers. She’s tweeted a grand total of 206 times. 29th place Eminem: 328 times; 34th Lil Wayne: 945; 40th Drake: 1,531. 57th place Christina Aguilera: 596. Beyoncé has deigned to tweet to her 13.3 million followers 8 times, while Kanye West has dropped 66 pearls of wisdom on his 10.3 million. On the other end of the spectrum, 30th place Nicki Minaj has cleared 26,000.
In the top ten, the number of tweets grows somewhat, but with only Justin Bieber showing any real commitment to actually using Twitter with his 26,400 tweets. By comparison, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Britney Spears, and Justin Timberlake all fall between 2-5,000 tweets. All of their accounts were started in either 2008 or 2009. That’s a rough estimate of between 1-2 tweets per day, which may sound like a lot to people who aren’t regular users, but it certainly doesn’t represent the type of daily engagement Twitter would like to see among its user base. It seems strange then to tout the most prominent users of a product when they can barely even be bothered to use it themselves. It would be like a cable provider promoting its most popular channels that broadcast ten seconds of programming a day.
And that’s before we even consider the idea of interactions on Twitter. Most stars like these use Twitter as a megaphone, popping on from time to time to blast out an announcement about a new video or album, but not getting dirty with the hoi polloi; you know, using Twitter as it’s meant to be used. Many of them likely delegate their tweeting responsibilities to assistants.
For Twitter, promoting these type of accounts makes good business sense in the short term, as it always makes for a good headline. “Katy Perry Overtakes Bieber!” and so on. Utilizing prominent accounts as a means of marketing or advertising is something any media company would do, but for the average user, it’s a disheartening look at the direction the company seems like they’ve been going as they try to figure out a workable monetization model, becoming a more traditional top down media company rather than a leveled playing field of lateral communication. That seems like a misstep to me. The subject of music on Twitter isn’t so popular because the musicians we listen to show up there every now and again to make an appearance, it’s because it’s the conversation we the users have decided we want to have.
Luke O’Neil is on Twitter, using it properly – @LukeOneil47
