

Twitter likely to kill its music app - k-mcgrady
http://allthingsd.com/20131019/twitter-likely-to-kill-its-music-app/

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klapinat0r
Twitter had a music app? I'm not trying to be funny or condescending - this is
litteraly the first time I've heard of Twitter #Music, and I wouldn't say I've
been living under a rock. Also I'm an avid Twitter user.

That being said, sorry it didn't work out. There's a lot of innovation to be
made in the music industry.

~~~
mwilcox
[https://music.twitter.com/](https://music.twitter.com/)

~~~
jamesbritt
Too bad that never appeared as an unrequested "promoted" tweet, instead of the
routine promoted drivel that means nothing to me.

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pokoleo
This is annoying. I really liked the WeAreHunted startup which was killed on
acquisition. The Twitter app had different functionality, and wasn't able to
hold a light to the WeAreHunted music recommendation service.

I feel for the WeAreHunted guys, they really had stuff going for them.

[http://wearehunted.com/](http://wearehunted.com/)

~~~
liamzebedee
I agree, WeAreHunted provided superior service to the Music app. The ability
to play the entirety of a song without a Twitter and Spotify account was
awesome — it was a great new way of discovering music.

~~~
aray
Well if you have spotify they're posting the emerging charts again on it
(still really miss the discovery engine though):
[https://twitter.com/wearehunted/status/381496704052129792](https://twitter.com/wearehunted/status/381496704052129792)

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dmix
Maybe they're refocusing their team effort on things like EventParrot:

[http://www.techhive.com/article/2053686/twitters-event-
parro...](http://www.techhive.com/article/2053686/twitters-event-parrot-
account-experiments-with-personalized-news-alerts.html)

Another strange Twitter experiment on the surface. But maybe it's to test out
some machine learning stuff they are building/acquiring.

Branching out into new territory trying to find meaning in the massive
database they have. Music seems to have been a failure (or maybe just the
UI/product was).

I work with a company doing NLP for book recommendations from Twitter feeds
([http://bookvibe.com](http://bookvibe.com)) and while it can be extremely
challenging given the variety of Tweet slang/text, there is some value in the
opt-in nature of peoples Twitter social networks. Much more than say Facebook,
which from our testing completely fails at being a good source of recommended
content, for ex recommending a movie because x liked it. Since on Facebook you
friend a lot of people by proxy of knowing them in life (parents/old
friends)... not following based on shared interests like with Twitter.

/tangential rant

~~~
tehwebguy
Maybe tangential, but interesting!

It seems like not only do you get more information from someone tweeting about
a book (etc) vs just liking it on Facebook, it takes more effort and that
probably says something too!

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antr
I love Twitter's music app, I have discovered so much good music that I
constantly use it to find new songs and bands.

However, I believe that the fact that one needs an additional paying service
(Spotify, Rdio) to listen to full tracks is a friction that kills the product.

I was hoping that Twitter Music was going to be Twitter's version of Pandora
or iTunes Radio, but not an extension of a third party $ervice.

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rajbala
There's so much promise in Twitter #music. It would be a shame if they killed
it rather than iterate on the product. I started using it the day it was
released and was really hoping for something special.

I stopped using it regularly because it's leaderboard driven. Jay-Z was at the
top of the hip-hop section for days on end. So discovering new hip-hop was
nearly impossible, but they have that data.

~~~
adamnemecek
That just goes to show how phresh is Jay-Z's music .

/s

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ianstormtaylor
Seems weird to not even try and iterate on it. The concept for #music seems
pretty solid. I could see it being expanded into popular and trending lists
for all different sorts of things: books, articles, fashion, movies, etc. And
then Twitter could be the goto source for what's trending nowadays. That seems
incredibly valuable if they could manage it. Wonder what has been deemed more
important.

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DigitalSea
I predicted this not long after they purchased We Are Hunted. I quite
personally thought the actual We Are Hunted music discovery platform was
fantastic, it was a well-built application and I always found it strange
Twitter bought WAH. I personally know the WAH team they purchased are an
incredibly talented bunch of developers, whether it keeps that team during the
next phase remains to be seen though. The whole concept was flawed from the
beginning and it didn't actually appear as though Twitter integrated any of
the main core of the WAH discovery platform which was a well-written and
surprisingly accurate algorithm.

Had they thought about it some more, marketed themselves better and integrated
more of the features from We Are Hunted's music discovery engine, maybe it
might have faired better. It's obvious this was very much an acquihire type of
situation.

~~~
aray
I absolutely loved (and miss) We Are Hunted's music discovery engine.

They recently started putting out the emerging charts again on Spotify, which
is interesting (they were on twitter music, but since you only got a few
second-clips of songs, it was useless to me):
[https://twitter.com/wearehunted/status/381496704052129792](https://twitter.com/wearehunted/status/381496704052129792)

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dave84
I enjoyed #music but if you're not particularly interested in the chart aspect
of it, it loses its novelty quickly.

I found the recommendations seemed to settle and that was it, there didn't
seem to be any point in going back once I had done my initial exploring. I
just opened it up again now after several months to see much the same
recommendations.

There's only so many recommendations that you can actually make though, so
it's hard to blame them for that particular problem as long as the
recommendations are accurate.

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goronbjorn
Bigger companies get criticized all of the time for not being innovative or
trying risky things.

When they actually do try something risky and it doesn't work out (e.g.
Twitter Music), they get crucified for shutting it down, even though in all
likelihood it's the right thing to do.

Can't win, it seems.

~~~
ulfw
Risky. Yes. Innovative? Hell no!

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josteink
I honestly had no idea twitter has a music app outside Spotify until now.

If I get it correctly though, does killing this also mean killing the backend
which the Spotify app depends on?

If so that does that mean twitter admits it can't make money/data from it's
twitter stream? That would put it in a horrible position when trying to sell
its stream API to future clients.

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mkr-hn
I remember this. I couldn't use it for the first three days due to bugs. Then
it told me I needed a premium subscription to whatever I connected with to
hear more than 30 second clips, and I never looked at it again.

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imnotlost
Wearehunted was the best music service around but when twitter got their hands
on it, it was done! Useless. Someone recreate it please... I would pay cash
money.

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gordonbowman
Not too surprised by this. #Music is a really hard business to crack. Only a
few have been able to do it successfully.

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loceng
They shouldn't kill it.

