Twitter's #Music app: from rumor to launch

Twitter is full of conversations about music, and the company wants those tweets to be important outside the world of the social network. To that end, Twitter has now partnered with Billboard to work on real-time charts that the companies hope will be "the new industry standard for tracking and surfacing the conversation around music as it happens."

The charts will monitor conversations about artists, tracks, and albums, and it will show which top musicians are the most talked about at any given moment. Another chart will highlight up-and-coming acts, many of which stir up buzz on social networks long before they're recognized by major industry players. Once the charts launch in the next few weeks, Billboard will publish them on its site and will embed them in tweets from their Twitter account.

Months after the company stopped active development on the app, Twitter #Music is being pulled from the App Store today, the company said in a tweet. The app, which attempted to harness conversations around music and artists on Twitter to create a new way to discover music, failed to peel listeners away from the many competing music apps on the market. The app will cease working for existing users on April 18th, the company said.

In a separate tweet, the company said it would look for "new ways" to incorporate music into Twitter: "We continue to experiment with new ways to bring you great content based on the music activity we see every day on Twitter."

Twitter #Music may not be much longer for this world. All Things D's Mike Isaac reports that multiple sources say the company is "strongly considering" shutting down the music discovery service, which has seen little public interest. Those sources didn't reveal how long #Music could last, but the report says that the service's fate "is nearly sealed."

The service first went live in April after a number of rumors that sparked a noticeable amount of hype. Activity on the site spiked in the early days, but since then the service has been largely forgotten. The sources tell All Things D that since launch downloads and engagement has been "abysmal." #Music is based around using data the social network has on you — like who you follow — to make recommendations. However, the service has always been oddly disconnected from Twitter proper, and the algorithms that make recommendations are very different than the individual-centric approach taken by competitors like Rdio. It seems natural that you would be able to see what influential people you follow on Twitter like to listen to, but such functionality is largely absent from #Music. Rumors of a shutdown come just a month after Twitter integrated its #Music playlists into Spotify and Rdio, making the service a bit more useful.

On the heels of its Spotify app release on Friday, Twitter's #Music platform is taking a swing at Rdio's streaming music service as well. Friday night, Twitter announced a new page within Rdio that would display 15 different #Music-generated playlists, including trending song and artist charts. The playlists are continuously updating, but otherwise fairly meager compared to the more polished Spotify app. Still, the possibility of playlist porting shows #Music's algorithms to be surprisingly versatile. Unlike Rdio's Heavy Rotation service, #Music playlists will import listening data from outside the app, potentially a boon for a smaller service like Rdio.

After a launch with plenty of buzz, Twitter #Music got awful quiet. There are a number of reasons for this, but the service may have just become a whole lot more useful. Twitter launched its own app for Spotify yesterday, meaning that you can use essentially the entire Twitter #Music interface within the Spotify desktop app. The reason why it's a real boon for the new music discovery service, however, is that all Spotify members (even those with free subscriptions) can now find and listen to entire tracks using Twitter #Music. (Previously, only paid Spotify and Rdio users could stream.) And since it's built into Spotify, listening to songs and adding playlists is much faster. Otherwise, it's largely an exact port of the web version, meaning there are five different "charts" that highlight music people are talking about. You can also chose different genres to explore. Unfortunately, one of the service's other major problems — namely, that it focuses almost entirely on data and algorithms, not on the individuals you follow on Twitter — remains an issue, but the new app for Spotify is certainly a step in the right direction.

A little over a month ago, Twitter launched #Music, its take on what a truly social music discovery service might look like. It was strategic, leveraging Twitter's enormous user base and vast amount of data, and thanks to a well-timed acquisition, saw some of the best product design the company has ever produced. When it launched, the press flocked to it as the second coming of Vine, a polished way for Twitter to shake up a new space and create an extra source for ad revenue in the bargain. If nothing else, this was bound to shake up the world of mobile music-streaming.

After a month of rumors, Twitter publicly launched its #Music service for iPhone and the web this morning — and you'll no longer have to be among the rich and famous to play around with it. Twitter #Music is a simple, visual way to explore songs and artists who your friends are listening to and who you may not know about, just by signing in with an existing Twitter account. It's a music exploration service that actually has you exploring — poking around at a grid of logos and artwork and searching through profiles, rather than curating yet another account of your own.

The app and website are broken down into four sections: Popular, Emerging, Suggested, and #NowPlaying. Each section displays a grid of album art and band logos that individually expand when you tap or click on them, letting you quickly follow or listen to an artist. By default, #Music will play short iTunes previews, which work surprisingly well here as a way to try out new music. If you have a Spotify or Rdio account however, the app can play full tracks instead.

After a week of teasing, Twitter has unveiled Twitter #Music, its new music discovery and streaming app. The new service is focusing on a recommendation engine that pulls in trending data from across Twitter and your followers to offer up music recommendations from the vast catalogs of iTunes, Spotify, and Rdio. The app will be available on iOS starting today, but there's no Android app quite yet. However, everyone will be able to access Twitter #Music through the browser at music.twitter.com.

As first reported by ABC's Joanna Stern, the service will launch later today, help you find what popular music is trending on Twitter, and will recommend more music based on bands and artists you follow. The app will be organized around four fairly self-explanatory tabs: Popular, Emerging, Suggested, and Now Playing. While those first two tabs are culled from the entirety of Twitter, the last two are based specifically on data coming from the people you follow. The app will also highlight band and artist Twitter profiles, with links to other musicians they follow.

The past week has seen a flurry of activity around Twitter's purported new music streaming service, #music. As previously reported, Ryan Seacrest told his followers last Thursday that Twitter #music was real, and he was already playing with it. Over the last two days, a number of prominent musicians have also tweeted about the service, which reportedly pulls in tracks from a number of services including Rdio, Spotify, YouTube, Vevo, SoundCloud, and iTunes.

With Twitter's new music discovery page online but not yet available to most of us, people have started digging into the page itself for details. After looking at the landing page's HTML, designer Youssef Sarhan found another linked page and dug through its source as well, revealing some of the UI elements and services that will probably be integrated into the tool. Specifically, Sarhan found hooks to connect YouTube, Vevo, Spotify, Rdio, iTunes, and SoundCloud; some of these had already been rumored, but they're now apparently confirmed. Early adopters have also begun tweeting out tracks from Rdio and SoundCloud, corroborating these features.

In addition to the services, the code also reveals a little more about how we'll use the service. One section is marked ".iconmusic-player-btn-buy," suggesting users will be able to buy songs, and others suggest music charts, artist biographies, and tools for following users (possibly either through Twitter or its own system) or composing tweets. The full page source is available here; it's possible more interesting details will emerge as we look over it further.

A web page has appeared at music.twitter.com with a #music hashtag graphic and a sign-in button, adding further weight to reports that Twitter will be launching a music service very soon. The sign-in button leads to an authorization request for an app called "Trending Music Web," which Stephen Phillips, founder of We Are Hunted — the music service Twitter just acquired — has recently been tweeting songs from. The tweets link to tracks on SoundCloud and Rdio, suggesting that these services will form a part of Twitter Music.

Twitter has been expanding its reach over the last year, and it's now moving into music: the company has just confirmed that it's acquired the team behind music discovery site We Are Hunted. The move was rumored by CNET last month and bolstered after We Are Hunted was taken offline; now, the team confirms that the site will be shutting down for good. Instead, the team will start working with Twitter on a new, undisclosed project. "We will continue to create services that will delight you, as part of the Twitter team," the site's main page now reads. "There's no question that Twitter and music go well together. Artists turn to Twitter first to connect with fans, and people share and discover new songs and albums every day."

CNET reported in March that Twitter was buying We Are Hunted in order to launch a standalone music streaming app based on the technology; according to sources, it would offer personalized music recommendations and stream music through SoundCloud. Now, the acquisition is a sure thing, but we still can't say with certainty what's coming. For now, neither Twitter nor We Are Hunted has anything to announce. "We wish we could say but we're not yet ready to talk about it," says the We Are Hunted team. "You'll hear more from us when we are."