Twitter purchased We Are Hunted, a music discovery service, last year and now it plans on releasing an app that uses its technology. According to CNET, an unnamed source has told the website that Twitter plans on launching an iOS application called Twitter Music by the end of this month. More evidence can be found in the #NowPlaying hashtags of We Are Hunted employees.
This is no doubt an ambitious project undertaken by Twitter but it won’t be doing it alone. Twitter will be piggybacking content from SoundCloud, the music hosting and streaming site. SoundCloud is a great platform for artists to put up and share music so it’s no surprise Twitter chose SoundCloud as the backbone of its Twitter Music app.
Twitter Music will be the first step that Twitter takes to becoming a full-fledged media company, competing with the likes of Spotify, Rdio, and Rhapsody. Twitter is already the home of thousands of musicians so it can leverage them for Twitter Music.
At the core of Twitter Music are song recommendations. The app will recommend artists for you based on who you currently follow, which means users will have to be following artists in order for this to work properly. Media will be displayed within tweets with a fully integrated SoundCloud player. It looks pretty slick.
Test#NowPlaying @whoisgambles – Safe Side ♪ soundcloud.com/whoisgambles/g…
— Stephen Phillips (@huntedguy) February 2, 2013
While Twitter has 65 million active users, it’s still unknown whether people want or need Twitter Music as a service when there are already great music discovery apps like Spotify and Pandora. There is still plenty we don’t know like how Twitter will monetize Twitter Music. All we can do is wait and see.
Source: CNET
