What Twitter Can Learn From Spotify

It’s approaching problems the way every late-stage internet platform does, at least before it discovers its limits: by presuming total victory and control over the industry it’s been working to enclose. Spotify’s success as a basic streaming service eventually entitled it to a central role in how music is made and distributed. Why shouldn’t its suc... See more

What was most interesting to me, though, was Dorsey’s comment about helping people manage paywalls. One of the biggest challenges to the subscription economy is the tension between leveraging social media to acquire new customers — which like social media itself, requires content that is free to access — and the fact that running a business means a... See more

After all, what does Spotify do? It takes a corpus of stuff (music) and finds endless new ways to show it to users. Users can save the stuff they know they like (a library), explore things curated by other users (playlists) or turn to the app's machine-learning tools for ultra-personalized recommendations (Discover Weekly and the like).