What Twitter Can Learn From Spotify

What is Spotify? When you abstract the service to its basics, it is a content distribution platform with a payment system.

It creates demand and decides who gets the rewards based on listening behavior. The revenue to share comes from either subscriptions or advertising.

In this imagined future-Twitter, the interface would only surface content from areas of the platform of which users are a member or a follower. The owners of brands, topics, and genres could either get a percentage of ad revenue or charge subscriptions (with Twitter getting a fee, of course) for access to certain types and pieces of content.

Twitter, like Spotify, should focus on a highly effective recommendation system, that leverages the human input on the platform for discovery and recommendations instead of wasting its resources on me-too features.

Unlike Spotify, it lacks a payment system, so it has no mechanism to enrich those who participate in its ecosystem. It relies on one single source of income — advertising, whose growth is showing signs of fatigue as monetizable daily usage is starting to plateau.

Like Facebook, its more successful and more evil older brother, Twitter is built around dopamine loops. It encourages behaviors that are mostly mindless and driven by emotional triggers.

At this point, I am feeling subscription fatigue and have no desire to sign up for any more annual subscriptions. It is like buying twenty-five albums to listen to twenty-five songs. Instead, I want an experience like Spotify, where my subscription pays for all the music I enjoy. I want my Twitter subscription to pay for what I am reading. By the w... See more