About a week after X commandeered the popular @X account from longtime Twitter user Gene X Hwang, another user has reported that X has taken over his popular account, @music.
“16 years ago, I created @music and have been running it ever since,” Jeremy Vaught, director of engineering at the nonprofit Life Happens, posted on X. “Just now, Twitter/X just ripped it away. Super pissed.”
Vaught told Ars that he created the @music Twitter account in 2007 as a way to promote independent music being performed live in Second Life.
Over the next 16 years, Vaught connected with a vibrant community of software developers on Twitter as he continued developing major promotions in Second Life. Then, once his online interests grew past Second Life, he continued using the @music account to simply post about music, as Twitter became his preferred social media platform. With that basic account premise, the @music audience exploded, and he organically gained followers, eventually building up to approximately 450,000 followers.
During that time, Vaught experimented with the @music account, seeking the best way to utilize the large following there.
“I’m a software developer,” Vaught told Ars. “And I was trying to come up with the right way to use that audience and do something with it.”
But Vaught never had the time to focus on leveraging the @music audience, only ever benefiting from the account when companies occasionally sent him free perks like headphones in trade for promotions. Occasionally, buyers would approach Vaught, trying to tempt him to sell the @music handle, but the biggest offer was only around $5,000. Vaught said he was never interested because he knew that selling his handle violated Twitter’s terms of service, and he figured there was more value in keeping the account.