Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Twitter Music Is Here Today, and You Can’t Use It

Want to play with Twitter’s new music app? You can get it today — if you’re really famous.

If not, you’re going to have to wait a week.

Here’s the deal: As we wrote yesterday, Twitter is launching its new music discovery app for iOS devices, timed to the start of the Coachella music festival this weekend.

But for now, only a handful of “influencers” are going to get their hands on it.

That’s why Ryan Seacrest was tweeting about the app yesterday.* And that’s why sources say you should expect to see dozens of other celebrities chatting it up over the next few days.

And you, non-famous person with an iPhone? Hang tight for a week.

So that helps explain why we heard contradicting reports about the app’s launch date (Today! This weekend!) yesterday. (They were both right! Sort of.)

And as long as the celebrities don’t spend their time tweeting about how much they dislike the app, it will be a smart move by the Twitter folks: They get to stoke demand and do some last-minute bug-testing** at the same time.

* This is not the first time a big Web company has used Ryan Seacrest in a faux-stealth app marketing push. Apparently it worked well for Zynga, too.

** This might have been helpful for the Vine launch earlier this year.

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Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.

— Author Tim Kreider on not getting paid for one’s work