New Twitter #Music App Sees Recommendations Based On Tweets And Followers

This week Twitter expanded its horizons further by launching its own music app, appropriately named Twitter #Music. Dovetailing with other music services such as iTunes, Spotify and Rdio, Twitter #Music is more of a discovery app that serves its users with small chunks of content.

As already the case with Twitter’s trending topics, #Music is intended to provide users with a snapshot of what is hot right now, by measuring social activity around artist and songs. As Stephen Philips explained on the Twitter blog:

“It uses Twitter activity, including tweets and engagement, to detect and surface the most popular tracks and emerging artists. It also brings artists’ music-related Twitter activity front and centre: go to their profiles to see who they follow and listen to songs by those artists.”

There are four ways to discover music on Twitter #Music:

• Popular – new music trending on Twitter.
• Emerging – a selection of emerging artists, presumably curated by Twitter.
• Suggested – based on the artists you follow, Twitter makes recommendation of other artists you might like.
• #NowPlaying – this is made up of the songs tweeted by people you follow, not necessarily what they’re listening to.

For the last two you’ll need to be logged in to Twitter to discover music in those ways. Because Twitter #Music is standalone, you don’t need to be logged in to Twitter or another music service to start finding tunes. However, until you login you’ll be restricted to 30-second clips of the songs provided by iTunes, so to hear full tracks you’ll need to sign in with a Spotify account or something similar.

At present Twitter #Music is available as a web app and on iOS . There isn’t really anything to shout about in terms of search functionality, but the early feedback seems to imply that the user experience is smooth and slick, with clearly a lot of thought from the designers as to how the app would respond as users interact with it.

Will Twitter #Music radically change the way we share and discover music, or do the likes of GrooveShark, SoundCloud, Spotify et al already have this all sewn up? Tell us your thoughts on this by leaving a comment below.