Twitter – Page 2 – Leaps And Bounds

Ashton Kutcher made headlines by beating CNN to a million followers on Twitter. But who are the music stars on Twitter?

Britney Spears has blitzed the 1 million mark right behind Kutcher and CNN. Today she is on 1.307,497 followers. Other stars?

As of May 4th, 2009 – John Mayer comes close with 948,413, P Diddy has 804,531 Coldplay sits on 722,533. We couldn’t find any other musicians over the half a million mark other than Dave Matthews who has 558,618. Trent Reznor bubbles just under at 438,868.

(Can you find anymore? Please let us know in comments).

It doesn’t bode well for Twitter being a place to discover music, especially new music. Even artists considered to cutting edge, like Lily Allen, hasn’t broken the 100K mark. The stars on Twitter seem to be existing megastars – not the next breaking wave, like in Myspace.

And of course, many of those megastar acts don’t have Myspace. U2, Kings Of Leon, Metallica and Radiohead are represented by fan twitters. The Killer’s ‘official’ page has but one post, four months old. There’s a big gap, and music fans on Twitter are bound to have a unsatisfactory experience.

This comes hot on the heels of the news that Twitter is not shaping up to be the future. News this week shows that 60% of Twitter’s audience do not return to the site in the following month. In short, not much is happening on there.

What will come of it now? It seems that almost everyone has heard of Twitter by now, but how does it explain it’s low numbers, and lack of activity?

Maybe Facebook and Google both made the right call to NOT buy Twitter…

Britney Spears –http://twitter.com/britneyspears
John Mayer –http://twitter.com/johncmayer
P Diddy – http://twitter.com/iamdiddy
Coldplay – http://twitter.com/coldplay
Dave Matthews – http://twitter.com/DaveJMatthews
Trent Reznor –http://twitter.com/trent_reznor

(An aside – my twitter – http://twitter.com/yauami – seems to have more and more spam followers. Something’s got to give)

Heres how you push... — Mike Skinner: Here's how you push...

In 2002, The Streets sang ‘Let’s Push Things Forward’ – a brilliantly eloquent middle finger to UK music culture, and how it stands still. 7 years and 4 albums later, the Streets (or, it’s main guy, Mike Skinner) is still pushing things forward.

Skinner has been posting links to new songs on his Twitter. It’s a really simple idea – but it’s not a huge publicity event. It’s just something he wants to do as an artist, and he’s getting stuff out there and people are listening. On one tweet, the man himself claims he has such a backlog of songs he can afford to give some away. It’s a very 2009 organic way of getting your music out there.

So far five tracks have been given away.

I Love My Phone – Trust Me – David Hassles – Long Working Day – See If They Salute

Trust Me is a highlight – a 70s disco number mixed with the unmistakable Streets vocal and grit. See If They Salute sounds like it could have been a single. Pop culture references to phone models, Facebook, Coke Zero colour the tracks. It’s not terribly groundbreaking, but a lot of fun. There’s a sense of silliness that was missing from the (otherwise brilliant) last Streets album, Everything Is Borrowed.

Many of the tracks are already appearing on the charts for WeAre Hunted. It definitely hasn’t escaped the blog world. It’s getting more excitement than that last record as well.

I guess this whole way of getting music out on Twitter is not that groundbreaking either. But it’s also kind of fun. There’s no signing up, no fixed schedule. It’s really when Mr Skinner feels like putting up a tune for us, and pushing things forward.

http://www.skinnermike.com/

Mike Skinner on Twitter – http://twitter.com/skinnermike

Tag: Twitter

Who are the stars of Twitter?

Everything Is Microblogged: The Streets on Twitter