For someone so interested in tech and music, I'm fairly old-school when it comes to listening to my collection. Second to playing actual physical copies, playing music exclusively on iTunes in the age of the Cloud is pretty much as archaic as it gets. I just really like the feeling of owning my albums, whether they're physical LPs or intangible MP3s. Nevertheless, social music seems more and more inevitable with the launch of Twitter's music app on Thursday.
Originally set to launch during the first weekend of Coachella, Twitter announced its music app after its acquisition of the music discovery service We Are Hunted. The app, available on iOS and Web, relies on third-party music services – currently Spotify and Rdio – to provide a range of artists to listen to. This part is nothing new. However, it's the integration with Twitter that makes this app more appealing than, say, your average Spotify app. You can maximize the utility of the app if you follow lots of your favorite artists on Twitter, and if the people you follow post a lot of songs.
Of course, none of this is all that game-changing. Starting with Pandora and Last.fm, and recently with Spotify and Rdio, social listening has been on the rise. What's slightly cooler about Twitter's music app is that it makes good use of Twitter's API. In an era when up-and-coming artists can be born from tweets, an app like this that has a page of "hidden talent found in the Tweets" has potential to be far more telling than music blog aggregators like Hype Machine. While the latter is a pretty good indicator of budding talent at the moment, Twitter's music app could (theoretically) take over in the near future simply because of the difference between the time it takes to post a tweet and the time it takes to write a blog post.
Additionally, unlike Facebook, the app only uses your Rdio or Spotify account to stream full songs instead of also tracking what you're listening to within those apps individually.
One of the biggest downsides is that it does rely really heavily on your Twitter presence. Obviously I don't follow all the thousands of artists I have in my iTunes on Twitter, and this is reflected in my Twitter music app, which has a very incomplete list of nine artists. Another flaw is that the app doesn't recognize every artist I follow on Twitter as a musician within the app.
The app is ideal for discovery of new artists, but I'm not sure it has much more use than that. While the design is sexy and streamlined, and it provides for good digging and discovery, the app is at a very young age that leaves a lot of room for maturing. The idea of Twitter integration is a cool one, especially because a lot of people are much more active on Twitter than they are on other music services, but even this aspect could be improved upon by fine-tuning the API so it has an accurate list of artists.
In the meantime, I'm going to stick to my trusty old iTunes, which has a full list of all my favorite artists, including dead ones who aren't and will never be on Twitter. Or maybe I'll even break out some cassettes and floppy disks (you read that right) while I'm at it.