 "Twitter reportedly prepping a music discovery service")
All aboard the music bandwagon! After rumours that Google will be working on a music streaming app branching out of YouTube and Google Play, it looks like Twitter is joining the queue to make a mark on the music app world.
According to a CNET report, Twitter acquired We Are Hunted back last year and is reportedly building a music discovery service app. The service will apparently help users discover new music based on content from their Twitter profiles, making it a slightly unique idea as compared to other services in this category.
Music discovery is We Are Hunted’s USP
The app will simply be called Twitter Music and may be released for iOS as early as the end of the month. Tracks shown by Twitter Music are going to be hosted by SoundCloud. The app once launched will prompt Twitter users to sign into the service using their existing Twitter accounts in order to receive personalised music recommendations. Users who do not have a Twitter account too will be able to use the service, thereby increasing the chance of the service gaining more followers.
Twitter Music, according to the report, will have four main tabs. “Suggested” will recommend songs and artistes based on the artistes you are already following or people you follow are following, kind of Last FM with Twitter integration. “#NowPlaying” will bring in links to songs posted by other people you follow using this already popular hashtag.
The app will have two more tabs – “Popular”, which will aggregate tracks that are doing well at that point of time, and “Emerging” to list down up-and-coming tracks and artistes. We Are Hunted employees have apparently been testing the app out on Twitter as seen in a tweet by the company’s co-founder Stephen Phillips. The embedded music player looks exactly the same as SoundCloud’s, except the fact that the shiny orange play button has been replaced by a Twitter blue one.
We Are Hunted, the music discovery site, was founded in 2008 and works on pulling music trends from blogs, social media and P2P networks. Almost as if on cue, the service’s website is down with the message “We Are Hunted is not available at the moment.” We’re guessing something is definitely cooking here.
Co-founder Stephen Phillip’s test tweet
If Twitter has indeed acquired the company, it will be an audio feather on its cap after having introduced a video centric app called Vine earlier this year. Vine faced a huge number of problems with its launch, though. The service allows six seconds of looping GIFs that also play sound. The format attracted a lot of pornographers, leaving Apple, the host of the iOS only Twitter app red faced.
Twitter Music as an idea seems pretty safe that way, with the micro-blogging site building on already existing platforms to start a new service. It’s pretty possible that arch rival Facebook’s News Feed redesign, which overhauled the music section, could be behind Twitter Music’s origin. No matter what the case, Twitter seems to be set on the path to become a full-fledged media company, and nothing will come in its way.
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