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And Finally Business News Digital
Twitter takes @music handle for itself
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 7 August 2023
Last week the Twitter company – which, of course, is now officially called Fuck You Corp; no sorry, FXXK You Corp; or is it XXXX You Corp; or maybe just X Corp – anyway, whatever, the social media firm told the user who has been diligently tweeting with the @music handle since 2007 to “X off”.
The Elon Musk-owned X wants the @music handle for itself you see. Maybe so that it can bring together in one organised space all of the unlicensed music that swims around the social media platform, the Twitter company having been telling the music industry to “X off” long before Musk was in charge.
But then again, maybe Musk is going to do some licensing deals with the music industry so that he can post some legit tunes to the @music account he now controls.
Either way, none of that helps software developer Jeremy Vaught, who registered @music on the Twitter platform all the way back in 2007 and had more than 450,000 followers on the account. He now has to post content for that audience using the much less fun @musicfan handle, which X shifted his account over to last week.
Vaught confirmed to CNBC this weekend that he is really rather disappointed to have had the @music handle taken away from him after all this time.
Noting that someone else had originally set up an account using @musicfan back in 2011, he added that he hoped Musk hadn’t nabbed that from another user in order to give it to him. Meanwhile, on X’s decision to steal the snappiest handles on its platform for itself, Vaught said: “The whole thing is just skeezy”.
