Will voice and audio tweets rewrite Twitter's rocky history with music?

Once again, Twitter is trying to make audio a core part of its user experience — and musicians want in.

Last Wednesday (June 17, 2020), Twitter began rolling out “voice tweets,” which allows users to record and post up to 140 seconds of audio natively within the mobile app. Almost immediately, artists including John Legend, Lil Nas X, Liz Phair, Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, Iglooghost and Laxcity posted their own take on the feature, ranging from previews of unreleased tracks to just plain weird and in some cases inappropriate banter.

One of the main product designers behind voice tweets, Maya Patterson, shared that the feature was designed with “amazing storytellers on Twitter,” including musicians, podcast and radio hosts, comedians, journalists and activists, in mind.

At first glance, I was super excited about the prospects of a text-first platform like Twitter finally feeling more intuitive to audio creators like musicians. From my own conversations, many artists seem to sense a higher barrier to entry for building a following on Twitter, as a text-first interface limited the expression they were able to convey either through music or through visuals like on Instagram.

The ease of use of voice tweets could change that, especially for artists like Cardi B and Lil Nas X who have standout comedic personalities or are a natural fit for hosting podcasts or radio shows. Other potential music-related use cases that I’ve seen on Twitter include back-and-forth beat battles and TikTok-like skits that don’t come from musicians, but center music as a narrative storytelling tool (e.g. tongue-in-cheek “voicemails“) .

But then I remembered that this was far from Twitter’s first attempt at audio, and that the social-media company has had a rocky relationship with the music industry for years. Success in this new iteration is far from guaranteed.

While this is the first time Twitter is allowing native audio recording in tweets, it is not the first time they have tried to make audio a more central part of their user experience. Nearly six years ago, in October 2014, Twitter launched “Audio Cards,” which allowed users to listen to select SoundCloud and iTunes links natively within the social platform’s iOS and Android apps. Many musicians, including alt-J, deadmau5, George Ezra and Chance the Rapper, were part of the initial rollout of this feature with SoundCloud.

The design of the V1 Audio Cards looks strikingly similar to Twitter’s latest voice tweets — particularly the automatic “docking” of the audio stream at the bottom of the screen, which allowed users to continue browsing throughout the app while playing the audio in the background, in a de facto lean-back audio streaming experience. It was no coincidence that Twitter was reportedly mulling an acquisition of SoundCloud that same year.

Unfortunately, those third-party-powered audio cards no longer work. Users now have to click out to a separate window to play SoundClound links posted to the platform. The iTunes part of the partnership likely fell short due to licensing issues, as well as due to a general decline in digital downloads as a form of music consumption.

Outside of this previous attempt at Audio Cards and in-app audio listening, Twitter has had a mixed bag of music/tech products and initiatives that never really took flight. Before Audio Cards, there was Twitter Music — a standalone Twitter app for music sharing and discovery that launched in 2013, only to shut down one year later due to lack of traction. Then, instead of acquiring SoundCloud outright, Twitter invested $70 million in the audio-streaming service in 2016, but wrote off the investment just two years later.

In theory, though, Twitter should be a natural fit for music. As of last Sunday (June 20, 2020), six out of the 10 most-followed accounts on Twitter belong to artists. As I argued back in 2018, Twitter and SoundCloud in particular have a close affinity in their primary use cases for artists — namely, providing “a blank, immediate canvas for artists to express themselves and give mass audiences a glimpse into their creative and mental processes.”

Twitter has now gotten to the size where it is both a powerful marketing tool and a perceived monetization threat for music rights holders. The social platform, which has an eleven-figure market cap, still does not have any direct licenses to stream music. Its users — many of whom are musicians themselves — have been subject to multiple DMCA takedown requests from major labels and publishers, with no clear solution in sight for monetization yet.

I predict that these licensing and takedown issues will only become more pressing in the age of voice tweets. In fact, some people in the music industry, like art director and music producer Alex Medina, have already posted voice tweets filled only with music copyrighted by third parties, in order to stress-test Twitter’s takedown policy. The rapper Phonte pondered how long it would take “until somebody gets sued for sampling a voice tweet.”

That said, the timing of Twitter’s audio tweet feature release might finally pave the way for much-needed concrete change.

There’s a vast graveyard of startups like Chirbit, Pundit and Riffr that tried and failed to make “Twitter for audio” or “Snapchat for audio” a thing several years ago. (Version one of Anchor’s product was actually a Snapchat-like social audio feed whose contents disappeared after 24 hours — but the startup found a more clear-cut future in standard podcast distribution, culminating in its acquisition by Spotify last year.)

But amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, social audio experiences are more popular and in-demand than ever. Apps like Clubhouse, Storm and TTYL are ushering in a new wave of live, synchronous social audio experiences that are actually spontaneous, conversational and delightful — just like Twitter’s early days.

As an incumbent platform with capital to spend, Twitter may finally be in a good position to compete meaningfully in the modern social-audio ecosystem, especially given that it has served as inspiration for many other entrepreneurial audio projects. But the company needs to keep in mind that for audio tweets, increased adoption implies increased consumption — and for one of their biggest and most powerful user bases, namely the music business, more consumption means paying up.