Twitter has a music service. I do remember hearing it being announced some time ago, but I had completely forgotten about it.
I decided to check it out.
It’s interesting. The premise of the service is that the top 5 tracks for popular artists will be displayed, and you can listen to them.
Technically, that means it basically, just pulls the top 5 songs, band art, similar artists from (for instance) the last.fm API, and then links them to the Artist’s twitter account.
It encourages a certain type of listening, good for gaining followers, but not listening in a way most fans will listen…
The problem is, often fans won’t want to *just* listen to the top 5 songs of an artist (judged by algorithm, not fan-perspective), so the platform offers no value to them at all.
In fact, it’s rather like someone is trying to package top40 radio back into an online streaming format… and I just don’t think it fits.The decisions users have to make don’t make sense.
Actually, the decisions users have to make don’t exist, because I’m pretty certain any self respecting music fan, would take a look at this, and sniff “NOPE” and head back to Spotify, Grooveshark, iTunes, Tomahawk, The HypeMachine or any number of other places.
For artists, I could see if possibly, of being one place they could gain followers quickly from. If you’re flicking through music, you might come across an artist, and decide to click “follow” – however, the “quick” aspect, implies that people have to be using the service like that, and I don’t think many people use it at all.
To me, it feels like a polished, somewhat licenced hackday or internal mashup project. There’s combination of two things, yet very little added value from the combination to intended users.
It’s clever but not compelling.
In my mind: since it’s clearly not winning, twitter should bin it, and stick to providing meta-chatrooms.
EDIT (27/03/14): Heh. They may have heard me speak. They’ve announced #music’s impending death!
