Micro-Payment: Chirpify Launches New Twitter-Based Sales Platform for Musicians
- Twitter Commerce’s start-up Chirpify (formerly Simp.ly) has just landed 1.3 million dollars in a first round of funding to cater for its development and hire more staff. It also announces the availability of a new platform for musical content sales.
- Both sellers and buyers must have associated their Twitter and PayPal accounts. Meant for musicians, this platform displays a Chirpify dashboard allowing them to upload their recordings and send “tweets” to broadcast them. Their future customers/fans will purchase each specific item through sending a tweet stating the term “buy”.
- The corresponding amount is then debited from the purchaser’s PayPal account. Once this operation completed, he receives a direct message including the link to download the given piece of music. Chirpify will charge a 4% transaction fee
Source: Chirpify announcement
- With over 140 million active users, Twitter is an efficient means to broadcast digital content. It has already been widely adopted by bands for promotion and by their fans to track their activities. Today, the micro-blogging platform is addressing a niche sector through proposing musicians to monetise their recordings and other tickets directly.
- This dedicated app implies a “real” payment, unlike other solutions, such as “PayWithATweet” for example, which relies on the value of the network itself to raise the visitor’s interest for promotion ends.
- Chirpify has been designed to walk Twitter from “simple” broadcasting and recommendation to the actual payment act. This easy to use platform associated with PayPal fits the needs of digital content sales, often based on micro-payments.
- This solution also reminds one of another tool launched by the Belgian start-up Paycento: a social platform enabling Internet surfers to sell and buy goods using Twitter or Facebook.