Last week, Twitter announced a new service that resulted from its partnership with Rdio and Spotify. The new streaming/discovery service comes in the form of an iOS app, but it’s also
available on the web.
Instead of forcing you to build a music library from the ground up, Twitter #Music offers something tailored for your ears. More precisely, it provides music depending on the artists and bands that you are following, on what’s trending and on what your friends are listening to.
The app includes four sections that will help you explore the magnificent and sometimes deceiving world of music: Popular, Emerging, Suggested and #NowPlaying. Instead of boring text, each of these sections features a grid of band logos and album art.
First time users will only be able to stream iTunes previews of the songs they’re interested in. Rdio and Spotify users, on the other hand, can listen to full tracks if they log in using those respective accounts. As mentioned before, the app works just fine not only for streaming, but also for music discovery. The Suggested section features recommendations that are displayed without needing you to entry any data. If the suggestions are a tad off the mark, don’t get angry! The service should improve in time.
The iOS version is already out and can be downloaded for free. However, the Twitter #Music website has a “Coming Soon” announcement, showing that the Web version has yet to be launched in some countries. If this is the case for you, using a proxy server from certain countries (US, UK, Netherlands, etc) will fix the problem.
Android users might be disturbed by Twitter’s decision to only make this available for iOS and Web. Still, not the ones who have tried the iOS app were happy about it. Some commented on The Verge that the app has potential (for those of you who are not accustomed to this expression, it basically means that there is a lot of room left for improvements) and that Android users are not missing much. I guess we’ll have to wait till the Web version is live in all countries in order to determine whether that’s true or not.
All in all, I see Twitter #Music not as a way of expanding the chirping service’s user base, but more as a creative method of convincing users to become more active by playing their music and sharing it with their friends.
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