Lyor Cohen’s Company 300 Teams With Twitter

Lyor Cohen delivers the keynote address at Midem.

Twitter has entered a partnership with 300, a new company started by music execs Lyor Cohen, Todd Moscowitz and Kevin Liles.

300, backed in part by Google, is a label and music rights company founded last year which will use a nimble infrastructure and online marketing as keys to its strategy.

Cohen shared news of the Twitter partnership, which aims to discover rising talent and the habits of music fans, during his keynote Sunday at Midem in Cannes, France. The companies hope to discover artists and songs sparking an early buzz, and yield an understanding of how fans communicate and react to music.

According to the New York Times, Twitter will share information not publicly available with 300, such as tweets’ location tags. 300 will help Twitter organize data and develop software that could be used by artists or labels.

“We’re going to create A&R tools to find artists early, and help develop them,” Cohen said at Midem. “I’m really happy to be working with them. Certainly the modern A&R business, we all are looking for talent in various places, and certainly Twitter is a terrific place to look at talent, just like YouTube. If you wanna get signed, I think you have to engage with Twitter, and of course YouTube. And we’ll be looking and trying to develop tools that the rest of the music community can utilize. That’s super-exciting for us.”

The company’s name is a reference to the 300 Spartans that fought against thousands of Persians in 480 BC. “It was a battle that changed the way wars are fought,” Cohen explained last year. “These guys found that if you were well synchronized, strategic, loyal with great planning and preparedness you could do much more with less and be highly effective.”