The social network launches its own music app, linking up with Spotify, iTunes and Rdio.
Twitter today launched its long-anticipated music app and service, Twitter #Music. The service ties in with existing music providers, using Spotify or Rdio for live streaming features (users who aren’t signed up to either service can listen to 60 second snippets of tracks courtesy of iTunes).
The overall concept of Twitter #Music (what kind of person capitalises a hashtag?!) is to link into the user’s Twitter account, dividing the personalised music selection into a series of categories based on their account activity: Suggested for discovering new music, #NowPlaying to see what friends and followers are listening to, and Me to hear music from artists the user follows.
#Music also runs without an account, but in that scenario it’s only really useful for discovering the most popular tracks on the entire service, via the Popular category (currently Psy’s ‘Gentleman’…) or ‘hidden talent’ via the Emerging category.
There’s no shortage of streaming services and portals which allow users to discover new music, but Twitter has a head-start. The huge user base of the social network means that it already has millions of users who can immerse themselves in a personally tailored world of musical discovery within a few seconds.
The #Music service relies heavily on the user following artists and people who talk about music on Twitter, but it’s probably a fair assumption that most people who are interested enough to use it already will. Eight of the top ten most followed people on Twitter are pop artists.
What’s most interesting to us about Twitter #Music is to see how it affects users’ experience of the service as a whole. Are you likely to turn to Twitter #Music to discover new artists and tracks given that it integrates so smoothly with the existing Twitter service? Will the service steal the thunder of new music blogs? Let us know below.