I’ve Seen The Future Of Twitter And It’s Apple Music

When I was listening to Pharrell and Justin Timberlake (assumedly stoned out of their minds) ramble about the meaning of art with Cara Delevigne on Beats 1 over the weekend, I came to the sudden realization that the product that I had been listening to was the future of Twitter.

Apple Music is far from the most intuitive product Apple has pushed out, but the features they’ve finessed that emphasize discovery and live curated content are exactly what Twitter has been missing.

The fact that Twitter needs a new way to approach live content shouldn’t be a surprise, the company has teased Project Lightning, an upcoming feature that heavily emphasizes events, and investors have called for the deconstruction of the timeline as Twitter’s central hub. Project Lightning (or Moments) isn’t enough. What’s Trending wasn’t enough.

What Twitter needs is already sitting at the bottom of the Apple Music app, those tabs (specifically Radio and For You) hold the keys to the kingdom for the next iteration of Twitter.

What should be terrifying for Twitter is that what Apple did for music with Beats 1 it could just as easily do for sports or news through dedicated live channels.

One of Twitter’s most important acquisitions to date has been Periscope. The live video streaming service will surely see its importance grow, but if Twitter wants to grow extensively, they need to own the market for user-generated and professionally-curated mobile video content.

Twitter will either die or fully realize its potential as a massive media empire, it doesn’t have other options.

If it wants to maintain relevance and attract new users, Twitter needs to utilize its reach to hire actual journalists and celebrities to curate the news of everything inside a separate tab of its app. A 24/7 feed of multimedia content that is heavily crowd-sourced can make Twitter the up-to-the-nanosecond news source with thought leaders offering commentary to the 140-character snippets that never end.

Beats 1 gives Apple “exclusive personality” from major personalities. This should really be something that Twitter is doing as well, given the devoted, verified presence of such a large swath of pop culture figures on the site. Twitter should be hosting single-page AMAs inside their app and leveraging their celebrity members in a more visible manner. Periscope and Twitter could also work together to birth the live social media talk show and create Twitter celebrities just as Vine has produced its own stars.

Producing a live broadcast channel would be a pretty radical move, but Twitter really needs to grow more experimental and ambitious with producing media content and making it attractive.