After testing the app with music artists and influencers, Twitter #Music is now available at https://music.twitter.com and as a separate app for the iPhone through the App Store.
The service helps Tweeters find music that’s popular on Twitter and music based on the bands they follow. It offers a free preview and then links to other music sites for the full listen. The app is centered around four pages or tabs, which users can swipe through to access.
–The Popular page shows new music that’s trending across Twitter.
–The Emerging tab shows “hidden talent found in tweets.” While those two parts feed information about what the collective Twitterverse is jamming to, the last two focus on who you follow and your personal music taste, reports ABC News.
–The Suggested tab shows artists you might like based on the artists you follow on the service and who they follow.
–The #NowPlaying tab shows songs friends are listening to or tweeting about. For instance, if a friend tweets that they are listening to a song by Animal Collective, that song will show up on that page.
The iPhone app features pages that have a grid made up of artists and songs. Tap one of those and the song will start playing along with a spinning CD animation in the bottom left corner. Tap on that and you get an enlarged CD — you can drag your finger around the CD to fast forward or rewind within that song, reported ABC News.
And the fact that you don’t have to leave the app to listen might be one of the best parts. Twitter has integrated current music services like Rdio, Spotify and iTunes to allow users to play the songs right through the app or webpage.
“There are times when you need a single-purpose driven knife in the kitchen and there are times when you are out camping and you want a Swiss Army knife. We have different apps for different purposes,” Michael Sippey, Twitter’s VP of product, said earlier this week at the “All Things D: Dive into Mobile” conference when asked about the different apps Twitter has been releasing.
RBR-TVBR observation: The exploding social media company has the following of younger demos like no other social media site. Now it is capitalizing on that to monetize content for both itself and its music partners like iTunes. Not a bad idea, in that it doesn’t have to worry about streaming licensing fees from the labels—it links to other platforms for that.
Twitter is also close to reaching partnerships with Viacom and NBCU to bring more high-quality video and advertising to the site. The partnerships would let Twitter stream videos on its site and split the resulting ad revenue with the networks.