Twitter has scored a deal with LiveNation that grants them a license to record and live stream concerts that nobody else will have the rights to stream. The new promotion, called Music@LiveNation, promises to bring exclusive streaming content from August Alsina, Train, Zac Brown Band, Marian Hill, and Lords of Portland for now, with more artists likely to join the lineup as time goes on. This announcement comes from the NewFronts conference in New York. For the time being, Twitter has not stated details like how many concerts will be streaming, how users will access them, when the streaming will begin, or when they will add in new artists.
While information on the LiveNation deal was fairly sparse, it’s likely safe to assume that Twitter wants it to become a major attraction factor for their platform. LiveNation is one of the largest live music outfits in the United States, hosting thousands of concerts nationwide each year, featuring acts of all sorts across all musical labels. This announcement comes on the heels of news that Twitter will be starting up a news streaming service in conjunction with Bloomberg as part of their efforts to expand their streaming video content.
Twitter’s goal is reportedly to eventually have a 24/7 blanket of live streaming content of all sorts available to users. That initiative was recently dealt a blow when Twitter lost a large-scale NFL streaming deal to Amazon, but they remain undeterred in their goal to expand their streaming content lineup and leverage it to bring more attention, and hopefully more users, to their platform. This is just the latest in a series of identity switches for Twitter, though the service finally seems to have settled on simply providing its platform and content, and allowing users to decide for themselves how they’ll use it by nature of what services they access and what accounts they follow. Over the years, Twitter has been touted as a traditional social media service, a news services, and now it’s headed in the direction of becoming a live video powerhouse, though it runs the risk of finding itself in Facebook’s sizable shadow yet again by going down that path.