by 18a Editorial
Twitter have launched their new music discovery app and website – just over a week after closing down acquired site We Are Hunted.
Twitter #music has been talked about for a while – with music industry celebs being given a sneaky peak in order to whet our appetites by tweeting little tit-bits, and Twitter revealing “coming soon” style hash tags. And now it’s here – the new music recommendation service. Twitter’s official blog post on the launch says that it will “change the way people find music”. It lets you listen to what the people you follow on Twitter are listening to, highlights what artists are doing on Twitter and of course makes it very easy for you to Tweet songs you discover.
Using Twitter engagement and activity it predicts upcoming tracks and emerging artists. Twitter figure – correctly so – that they’ve got a close tie-in with music trends because so many musicians and bands use the social network to connect with their fans.
The music itself comes from a blend of iTunes – allowing you to hear snippets of songs – and then Spotify and Rdio. Subscribers to the latter 2 services can log in to hear the full track. As I don’t have a subscription to Spotify or Rdio I click play on one of the songs and I get a few seconds of it before it moves to the next track. So yes, it can let me hear a bit of what people are talking about but to really use it properly I created a Spotify account… and downloaded the exe file which I’m yet to install on my PC.
This basic Spotify account is free and is “made possible” by ads. If I wanted to hear music without ads I need to pay £4.99 a month to get it on my computer, or £9.99 a month for the “premium” service which allows me to access music on my phone and tablet. The pricing for Rdio works on exactly the same subscription model with the same prices of £4.99 and £9.99 but their “free” option appears to be a short term trial rather than an advertisement funded full time option.
I do like the way that these big players are working together – Twitter could have spent years longer developing something which served their own music but why re-invent the wheel? They’ve got the technology to know what people like – so it’s ideal to partner with companies who can then serve up that music.
All this all comes a week after Twitter announced their acquisition of WeAreHunted.com – a music website which looked a lot like #music in it’s layout but which let you hear the whole song without any log ins (that was optional for extra features).
The Australian based website, founded in 2007 by Stephen Phillips, Richard Slatter and Michael Doherty, had a great reputation and by the end was in a position to offer tracks from well known stars as well as emerging artists you’d never heard of. Twitter has the clout and the reach to take this further so despite closing down the WeAreHunted website and user accounts – no attempt at migration, they probably figured the users were already on Twitter – I’m sure there are 3 guys in Brisbane who haven’t stopped drinking champagne since the announcement!