Expansion at Twitter Spaces can help musicians promote themselves

Hours before the Fearless: Taylor’s Version album came out last month, Taylor Swift released the track ‘Hey Stephen’ to her fans on Twitter Spaces.

In March, Nick Jonas held a launch party on Spaces to 25,000 in support of his latest album, and in the same month, K-pop outfit NCT set a new attendance record with 103,000 listeners.

Others like 5 Seconds of Summer, D-Nice (who hosted the official after-party for the Grammys on the platform) and Finneas were among the first to tap the potential of audio conversations.

Twitter introduced Spaces in December 2020 on iOS and since expanded to Android.

Expansion to the feature are expected to make it an essential ploy for the music industry.

From May 3, the once invite-only feature went public to all accounts with 600 or more followers.

“Based on what we’ve learned so far, these accounts are likely to have a good experience hosting live conversations because of their existing audience,” the company said.

“Before bringing the ability to create a Space to everyone, we’re focused on learning more, making it easier to discover Spaces and helping people enjoy them with a great audience.”

Other features including ticketing, more block labels and warnings and improved captions will help Spaces compete in the fast-growing audio chat space.

In the coming months, said Twitter, celebs will be able sell tickets for their Space, set the prices and determine how many tickets be made available.

Twitter says the celebs will keep “the majority of the revenue” from ticket sales, but the platform will keep “a small amount”.

In early 2018 Twitter claimed 336 million MAUs. In its Q1 2021 report total number of monetizable daily users grew by seven million from the fourth quarter to 199 million – but fell shy of analysts’ expectations of 200 million.

A Beebolve study estimated the average Twitter user only has 200 followers, which means the expansion to ticketing is limited in terms of numbers.

In the next few weeks, users will also be able to co-host events and set up reminders for followers.

Right now, the market leader in the audio chat space is Clubhouse, the invite-only app which launched last March when the pandemic saw the world go into self-isolation.

In March, TMN reported that Spotify bought the maker of popular five-month-old sports talk app Locker Room, with plans to add music and cultural programming with ask-me-anything interviews and discussions in real-time with musicians, songwriters, sportspeople and celebs.

Facebook is said to be working on a rival app as well, according to the New York Times.