Twitter #Music

With information leaky around the news that Twitter had acquired We Are Hunted – a music discovery and chart site – to help them build a new Twitter music app/service, speculation was rampant on their motivation. It’s now clear why Twitter is venturing into music, because they were already running a music discovery service, they just needed a better way for people to tap into it.

Aiming big, Pandora seems to be the first target Twitter is gunning for with the way the app continues on after your first song choice. An obvious play for the mainstream radio crowd, those content to select a style of music and let it be background to their day. This is where the ‘Emerging’ and ‘Suggested’ algorithms will be a big deal and determine whether the casual music consumer keeps coming back to the app or site.

If you think you’re above the few charts offered and can’t benefit from the type of discovery #music is providing, let me suggest different ways of looking at the app. Since I was someone that knew pretty much every artist the app was initially suggesting, I dove down the rabbit hole of seeing which artists my favorite artists follow. This provides an organic experience and one that hasn’t really been accessible in a meaningful way before. Also, just tweeting out some good tracks from quality artists lets people who follow you get some solid recommendations. Don’t forget that it usually takes ~3 times of mentioning an artist or song before people give it a try.

Some of my humble suggestions for the service would be adding #music to Twitter’s main app, or better yet, add full tweeting ability to the more attractive #music app. Possibly even publishing an API to allow 3rd parties to add #music to their apps and give #music an almost serendipitous experience for the user to play songs inline other activity. I’d also love to see a way to over come finding artists that aren’t verified. A challenge for many reasons, but crucial to people looking for deep discovery. With smart people behind #music, I’m not worried about what the road map looks like at this point.

The real test for Twitter and #music is not right now in the initial offering because as many little quirks and issues people may have on launch, it’s a brilliant app. Six months later if people still aren’t naturally tweeting their listening habits by way of #music, that’s when it’s time to recalculate and course correct, but not until then.