Twitter Adds Music Service

Twitter announced a new music application called #music on April 18. It’s a cross between a music curation and a streaming service like Spotify and Rdio. The model is based around the manner in which Twitter users access music and information through the service.

#Music uses artist and users tweets to discover and explore new music, listen to music using streaming services, see videos on YouTube or Vevo and purchase songs using Apple’s iTunes. According to Twitter, they will “continue to explore and add other music service providers.” At the present time there is no Android application but it is under development.

#Music is deployed over 4 pages or tabs. Emerging shows “hidden talent found in tweets”, Popular displays music that is trending on the Twitter service and the other two show show you’re following and your music tastes.

Twitter’s new move into the music space is an attempt to broaden their offering beyond the 140-character world that has made them a household brand. At the beginning of the year, Twitter launched Vine, an app that lets users capture and post short videos of 6 seconds or less and last year, they acquired Posterous to enhance its photo sharing service.

The #Music app is free and available on browsers and mobile devices. The music app presents a subset of the main Twitter stream that’s related to artists and their music. And instead of showing trending topics for the entire Twitter sphere, it shows charts of trending songs, albums or artists.

The quality of the music is still limited to the streams delivered by the services.