<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Twitter billed its foray into music discovery as a mechanism to \"surface songs people are tweeting about.\" Yet Twitter doesn't actually plan to make any money off of the music itself. So why bother? \nIn a word, advertising. Twitter hopes that Music will get people to stay longer on the platform and to get users to reveal more about themselves for better targeting.  \nThe former addresses a major weakness for Twitter. As the following graph shows, Twitter is far behind Facebook on time spent:\n\n\nTwitter has been working hard over the past couple of years to increase the metric by fashioning itself as a media hub. Clark Fredricksen, VP at eMarketer, says that now Twitter \"wants to be a place where people find new things. The launch of Music is a logical extension of that.\" Giving users a reason to visit Twitter more and stay on longer provides more advertising opportunities. \nAnother raison d'etre for Music is that it gives users the opportunity to tell advertisers more about themselves. \"It's more valuable if the user begins to identify himself as interested in certain things,\" Fredricksen says. Last year Twitter began letting advertisers target users by interest \u2014 in addition to other descriptors like age, sex and geographic area \u2014 with hundreds of interest categories including \"movies and TV' and \"pets.\" \nThis week, Twitter also added keyword targeting that lets marketers further refine their targeting based on things you tweet about. Declaring yourself a fan of Jay-Z or Brad Paisley (or both) tells marketers a lot about you and helps Twitter sell more ads. As BuzzFeed notes, that will be especially valuable if Music prompts the 40% of Twitter users who are \"consumers\" to actually tweet.\nThat said, the success of Music is far from assured. Yinka Adegoke, the deputy editor for Billboard, says that despite all the hype about Facebook's role in music discovery, \"radio is still huge and YouTube is right up there.\" Though Facebook has 1 billion users and deep integration with Spotify, the platform \"is not high up\" on the list of music discovery influencers, Adegoke says. \nAdegoke says that the industry isn't sure why that's the case. Perhaps it's because social media is still such a visual medium compared to, say, radio. Consumers' transition to mobile may hasten that change, though, as will the increasing array of in-car music options. On the other hand, it may turn out that many consumers are fairly passive about the way they discover new music. Rather than \"surface\" their music from Twitter, they may stubbornly prefer to do it the old fashioned way. \nImage via iStockphoto, liangpv and crossroadscreative"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/04/18/why-twitter-music-business/>