Twitter Music

It is widely rumoured that Twitter are working on a standalone music app right now. It could be available on IOS as early as the end of the month and is imaginatively named ‘Twitter Music’. This is an exciting move as music has a colossal presence on Twitter. Some artists have more followers than world leaders and most music bloggers seem to spend all day every day on Twitter, which all leads to endless networks and communities chock full of music related engagement. With Facebook and Spotify working together to dominate music streaming and discovery, it makes sense for Twitter to create their own branded app and challenge them. Twitter’s access to the data motherload will enable them to analyse the behaviour of their users and listen to their preferences; this means that the combination of the right data crunching and a user’s network could be a match made in heaven.

There are reportedly going to be four main tabs:

Suggested – this will be the main music discovery part of the app, it will recommend songs based on the artists and users you follow.  This has the potential to be a powerful tool to keep you up to date with the latest releases from your favourite artists. It’s hard enough to keep up with them all at the best of times, so having them in one place would be very handy, as well as having the added bonus of getting suggestions from other people in your network.

#NowPlaying – this will potentially pull in links to songs tweeted by users you follow using hashtags. The #nowplaying hashtag exists already and I have always found it a little annoying and spammy. As the streaming service behind the app will be Soundcloud, it would be beneficial to harness a similar data stream akin to Scrobbling on Last FM (a smart way of showing off what you’re listening to without dominating your feed and being too in your face). I think this has the potential to be very useful, but only if it’s based on real streaming data and doesn’t hog everyone’s feed.

Popular - this will bring in the top trending songs from ‘We are hunted’ – a music discovery service that Twitter have recently acquired. This will be useful for people into the biggest and best selling bands,  but I can’t see it setting the world alight, as the radio and charts already have this covered.

Emerging – this tab is designed to track emerging arts.  As yet, I’m not entirely sure how this will work, but using the data pool to tap into each user’s personal music taste will ensure that emerging artists are tailored to the individual. There are plenty of websites out there that can supposedly tell you who the next big artist is going to be, so it would be a wise move to align with users’ data and networks to provide a unique discovery experience. The service will hopefully also provide an exciting opportunity for emerging artists and unsigned acts to get their music into the heart of Twitterdom.

The app is in its very early stages so it’s tricky to know the exact direction it will go in. It could either take the form of a substandard music recommendation service, which points you in the direction of the most popular music out there,  or they could capitalise on the wealth of Twitter data and use who you follow, your listening history and gigs you’ve attended and make something truly special. There are an infinite number of conversations out there about music, and if Twitter utilise the information to its fullest extent, they could end up creating something amazing for fans, artists and the industry in general. The possibilities are endless.

Rich was born and bred in Bridgend, South Wales and is one of the Tempero old school. When he’s not offending everyone in the office with his mind-blowing doomcore playlist choices his extensive knowledge and experience of social media helps manage some of Tempero’s largest clients.