Rumors have been circulating recently about Twitter’s (News - Alert) upcoming music service, which was predicted to launch at last weekend’s Coachella music festival. Today, Twitter has finally unveiled the launch of Twitter #music, a music service that will use Twitter activity to list popular songs, highlight emerging artists, and promote musicians’ Twitter profiles. It will also allow users to tweet songs from iTunes, Spotify (News - Alert) and Rdio straight from the app.
Twitter acquired music discovery service We Are Hunted last year and is using its technology to build a standalone music app.
“Twitter and music go great together. People share and discover new songs and albums every day. Many of the most-followed accounts on Twitter are musicians, and half of all users follow at least one musician,” wrote Stephen Philips (News - Alert), founder, We Are Hunted, in a Twitter blog post. “This is why artists turn to Twitter first to connect with their fans — and why we wanted to find a way to surface songs people are tweeting about. We offered music artists an early look at the service. You can see some of their reactions below. We hope you like it, too.”
Twitter #music gives users the option to sort trending music by “Popular,” “Emerging,” “Suggested” and “#NowPlaying." The “#NowPlaying” section is music being played by people I follow, and “Suggested” is based on the different accounts that I follow.
The service is available for iOS in the App Store for free and is offered as Web version at music.twitter.com. It is currently available in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Twitter plans to bring the service to Android (News - Alert) and more countries in the future.