How Twitter Will Change Music Forever

I really think you should buy The Indelicates’ book, Words. You probably haven’t heard of The Indelicates – they’re not a big band – but you should buy their book first and then buy their album. All because of Twitter.

 

This is not what you think. Since I started writing for MSN, I’ve been surprised and amused to discover that some people on the messageboards have got a very strange idea of how the site works. A few users thought the bands we championed or pilloried were all according to some central corporate policy – Bill Gates and his team deciding whether to slag off The Killers.

 

Quite the opposite: I know that the music industry is out there somewhere with its network of pluggers and opinion formers and no doubt sacks of cash and drugs. But none of that gets anywhere near people like me. No, the reason I like this band The Indelicates is because someone on the internet recommended them. And I really want you to buy their book because of Twitter.

 

The truth is at the moment Twitter is a giant experiment; no one knows where it’s going. Twitter is certainly changing the music industry – changing music buyers, bands and songwriters. I think it’s more significant than Napster, MySpace or iTunes. They were ultimately just changes in the distribution; Twitter, if you let it, will change what it means to be an artist and what it means to be a fan.

 

People often misunderstand what’s exciting about Twitter. It’s not a technology story – there’s no innovation there. It’s not even a sales story. Twitter has growth, sure, but it’s not making any money. It’s purely a social phenomenon. It’s not just Twitter, either, but Twitter is the purest and best known instance of a social change that is huge. Like all social/cultural changes with a young bias, it will hit music hard.

 

Sometimes, the big things come not from liberation but from limitation. Twitter restricts messages to 140 characters. That was to be compatible with another messaging format which everyone overlooked at first but which has transformed the way everyone communicates: SMS texting.

 

Twitter is an asymmetric public address system: from the few to the many. By default, anyone can read anyone else’s messages, and if they choose to follow, they will receive people’s streams of consciousness automatically. It’s a mass-broadcast channel that’s also intimate and immediate. Twitter makes it easy, too easy really, to fire your tiniest casual thought off to thousands of people. That sort of access is like crack to motor mouth egotist lead singers.

 

It wasn’t long ago that every utterance or note a band made was controlled by publicists and artists who enjoyed the megalomania. Now, that singer has immediate access to all his or her followers from the phone in their pocket.

Crucially, the bar has been lowered so people are comfortable enough to write, but the creatively-inclined can work hard to squeeze the best out of the 140 characters.

 

Any singer or band member, however obscure, will find themselves receiving replies from interested followers. Twitter is casual, so there’s no requirement to respond to these replies. Yet most who are active on Twitter are also busy replying, which amounts to a direct one to one connection between artist and fan that has simply never existed before.

 

It’s fun to knock Twitter, but here’s the important bit that gets missed. It’s a huge opportunity for the cynical music industry. One of the key events in the development of Twitter in this country was Stephen Fry updating the world that he was stuck in a lift. Yeah: how trivial is that? But that’s not how our brains work. We’re social creatures and if we hear the everyday details of someone’s life, we start to feel a real connection with them.

 

So unlike Facebook, which attempts to recreate real world relationships on the internet, Twitter can be a sort of trick – it’s internet age technology fooling our hunter-gatherer brains. Followers feel we know the artist in a more direct and powerful way than ever before. It creates a huge loyalty which, through replies to followers, is reciprocated by the artist back towards the fan base.

Back to The Indelicates. They’re a little band, but they tweet a lot – occasionally as the band, but more often as the two principals Simon and Julia. Their debut album American Demo is excellent, in my opinion, though it’s not for everyone – it draws upon early ’90s literate, sneery, angry indie music like The Auteurs and Carter USM. I found it difficult to write that last sentence, because of Twitter. I’ve never met the band, but saying that feels a bit like slagging off a mate.

 

The reason I want you to buy their book is because they need the money, and they get far more from that than from someone downloading their album on iTunes. Simon would like to buy a new laptop and visit America more often. I could go on. They’re a very self-conscious band so this level of unstarry realism suits them. But every artist who tweets a lot creates a similar connection.

 

Things will carry on going this way and, even once Twitter has been replaced by the next thing, this direct, intimate, constant access will change what it is to be a creative person. And one day, I guess, the industry will work out how to exploit it and we’ll wish we’d kept quiet about how great Twitter was.

 

Musicians on Twitter

12 albums that changed music

Celebrity 'tweets' of the month

 

The views in this column are those of the author alone and not of MSN/Microsoft