7 ms·

Twitter likely to kill its music app

41 points by k-mcgrady 13y ago

goronbjorn 13y ago
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 13y ago
  Risky. Yes. Innovative? Hell no!
klapinat0r 13y ago
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 13y ago
  https://music.twitter.com/ https://music.twitter.com/
  - cstrat 13y ago
    haha thanks, i had no idea either!!
  - jamesbritt 13y ago
    Too bad that never appeared as an unrequested "promoted" tweet, instead of the routine promoted drivel that means nothing to me.
- kmfrk 13y ago
  App, service, thing, gimmick. :)
- w4 13y ago
  That was my first reaction too -- I assumed it was getting killed in development. I had no clue it had actually launched, and I'm also a Twitter user, and a musician/music fan to boot. I suspect the lack of awareness might have as much to do with the lack of user engagement more than anything else.
  - at-fates-hands 13y ago
    Mine too and I feel like both myself and my friends are pretty well plugged in and we all completely missed this. I haven't seen any promoted tweets on my feed, nothing on FB (admittedly I don't check it that often) and nothing on G+. Also nothing from friends who usually ask me if I know about stuff like this. I'm still puzzled how this flew under my radar.
    - thaumasiotes 13y ago
      You'd be surprised what you can somehow go without ever hearing about. I still remember walking into a bookstore and being floored by the prominently-displayed (then) new Ender series book. That's something I should have known about long in advance. I am the ideal person to advertise such a thing to.
- rblatz 13y ago
  I was shocked too, I'm not the most dedicated twitter user but is tweet multiple times a week and twitter is the main way I keep in contact with multiple friends. No idea that twitter music was a thing. Seems like they didn't put much energy behind it.
dave84 13y ago
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.
loceng 13y ago
They shouldn't kill it.
gordonbowman 13y ago
Not too surprised by this. #Music is a really hard business to crack. Only a few have been able to do it successfully.
pokoleo 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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
rajbala 13y ago
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 13y ago
  That just goes to show how phresh is Jay-Z's music . /s
dmix 13y ago
Maybe they're refocusing their team effort on things like EventParrot: http://www.techhive.com/article/2053686/twitters-event-parrot-account-experiments-with-personalized-news-alerts.html http://www.techhive.com/article/2053686/twitters-event-parro... 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 13y ago
  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!
ianstormtaylor 13y ago
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.
mkr-hn 13y ago
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.
imnotlost 13y ago
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.
antr 13y ago
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.
DigitalSea 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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
josteink 13y ago
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.

41 points by k-mcgrady 13y ago

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 13y ago
Risky. Yes. Innovative? Hell no!

klapinat0r 13y ago

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 13y ago
https://music.twitter.com/ https://music.twitter.com/
- cstrat 13y ago
  haha thanks, i had no idea either!!
- jamesbritt 13y ago
  Too bad that never appeared as an unrequested "promoted" tweet, instead of the routine promoted drivel that means nothing to me.
kmfrk 13y ago
App, service, thing, gimmick. :)
w4 13y ago
That was my first reaction too -- I assumed it was getting killed in development. I had no clue it had actually launched, and I'm also a Twitter user, and a musician/music fan to boot. I suspect the lack of awareness might have as much to do with the lack of user engagement more than anything else.
- at-fates-hands 13y ago
  Mine too and I feel like both myself and my friends are pretty well plugged in and we all completely missed this. I haven't seen any promoted tweets on my feed, nothing on FB (admittedly I don't check it that often) and nothing on G+. Also nothing from friends who usually ask me if I know about stuff like this. I'm still puzzled how this flew under my radar.
  - thaumasiotes 13y ago
    You'd be surprised what you can somehow go without ever hearing about. I still remember walking into a bookstore and being floored by the prominently-displayed (then) new Ender series book. That's something I should have known about long in advance. I am the ideal person to advertise such a thing to.
rblatz 13y ago
I was shocked too, I'm not the most dedicated twitter user but is tweet multiple times a week and twitter is the main way I keep in contact with multiple friends. No idea that twitter music was a thing. Seems like they didn't put much energy behind it.

dave84 13y ago

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.

loceng 13y ago

They shouldn't kill it.

gordonbowman 13y ago

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

pokoleo 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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

rajbala 13y ago

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 13y ago
That just goes to show how phresh is Jay-Z's music . /s

dmix 13y ago

Maybe they're refocusing their team effort on things like EventParrot: http://www.techhive.com/article/2053686/twitters-event-parrot-account-experiments-with-personalized-news-alerts.html http://www.techhive.com/article/2053686/twitters-event-parro... 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 13y ago
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!

ianstormtaylor 13y ago

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.

mkr-hn 13y ago

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.

imnotlost 13y ago

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.

antr 13y ago

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.

DigitalSea 13y ago

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 13y ago
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

josteink 13y ago

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.