Twitter Music App Goes Live Today | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Music App Goes Live Today

techcrunch.com

42 pointsjordn41 comments

Playing with it now and it seems pretty good. The trending chart is obviously full of the usual suspects (Psy is #1 right now). The emerging chart is actually quite good. I haven't heard of anyone on it but already heard a few good songs. The suggested chart (based on artists on you follow which the app finds automatically when you link your Twitter account) is also quite good. It's finding me tracks by artists I know but haven't heard in a while and a few new ones too.

The play interface is a bit clunky. I've already accidentally switched to the next track and there doesn't seem to be a way to seek so when I went back I had to start the previous track from the beginning again.

The app makes sharing what you're listening to pretty easy and includes a link to the track on the music service you've linked your account with (Spotify or Rdio).

Search is a bit funny. It says 'search for artists' but really just returns a list of twitter users matching your search term. I could see twitter introducing some sort of artist account. It can't be that hard to verify an artists authenticity through checking if they have music on Rdio, Spotify, or iTunes.

It seems like it could be a good service and is soemthing that will be useful to me immediately but they do have a few things (mainly the playback interface and search) to work out.

Edit: The website is now live: https://music.twitter.com

Is this on your iPhone or on the web? Can you provide a link to it live anywhere?

On my iPhone. I user a link from The Verge's article: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/twitter-music/id625541612?mt...

Not sure about the app, but on the web interface you can seek inside a track by clicking around the disc image.

Thanks for the tip, that works in the app too.

Well that now makes the second Twitter product without an Android launch strategy. The first, Vine, looks like it'll flame out by the time they ever toss a half broken app across the corporate firewall. Are they running out of cash or something? Their competition doesn't seem to be having a problem with supporting more than one platform.

Edit: I'd also like the point out the irony of hitting "Play Full Tracks", picking Rdio, then immediately being presented with a Facebook logo and login option but no Twitter SSO. /facepalm

>> "Well that now makes the second Twitter product without an Android launch strategy"

They do have the website which works fine on mobile.

That's a piss poor Android strategy.

And as a side note I'm still getting this on Android:

http://i.imgur.com/Ox0BwML.png

Hopefully it's just a cache issue.

I'm getting that on iPad as well. I guess the site is not ready.

Well, that is the Rdio login which supports username/password or Facebook. And yes, that is hilarious.

Nothing would please me more than people moving away from mobile-specific apps toward web applications.

I'd agree with you but we are not there yet.

I've yet to see a beautiful web app on mobile not be a sluggish buggy mess. Twitter's mobile web app at first look decent but it's sooooo sllllllllooooowww and unresponsive on a quad core phone.

Forecast.io's mobile site is the first time I've seen any app or browser instance cause a phone to lock up and never recover. I'm suspecting that's a GPU driver bug.

I don't use mobile sites, so I don't have any perspective on that. I'm just irritated at all the things that are mobile-only when they don't need to be. The best way to get the web to look better on mobile is to encourage developers to start thinking about the web again.

... in some countries.

    Right now, the service is available in the US, Canada,
    the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Over time, we
    will bring the service to Android as well as to more
    countries.

http://blog.twitter.com/2013/04/now-playing-twitter-music.ht...

Woohoo! For once Australia and New Zealand aren't 3 years later. Well done Twitter (and We are Hunted).

I wonder if it is because Twitter Music is from buying We Are Hunted which, if I recall correctly, was an company from Australia.

Well, that's a bummer. Why do they include services like iTunes and Spotify if they were going to limit the product's availability? I doubt that I'd use the service regularly, but I was excited to check it out.

I'm disappointed by the description (but I never used wearehunted; if I had I probably wouldn't be surprised). I was really hoping for an easy way to share individual songs over twitter (in a way that doesn't require me or the people that might listen to the songs to have external accounts). Right now I use embedded youtube videos which has gaps in coverage, quality, etc.... Twitter might have the resources and influence to pull something like that off.

The flip side being that if it's easy for people to share songs, and there's an easy way to play a stream of songs w/in twitter, then you get "discovery" from curated playlists.

I think http://toma.hk/ is the closest to that right now. It would be great to link up with something like http://musicbrainz.org/

A lot more details on theverge.com: http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/18/4238138/twitter-unveils-ne...

The service WILL launch today - iOS app and website. It will work with Spotify, Rdio and iTunes.

I hope at least one of two things happen - they somehow support Xbox Music (ZunePass), but I doubt that will happen since it isn't web based and probably has no interface...OR Rdio gets more music.

Q: do most people really have the data plans on their mobile devices to be able to listen to music all day? I'm in Canada and we certainly do not.

Not about Data plan, actually. When I was in Delhi, a $25/mo data plan gave me unlimited data usage with 100GB fair usage limit. I still could not listen to music and video all day - the battery bottleneck is much tighter.

Yes: I have wireless in my office and house (and no data plan for my iphone).

So what's the point in listening to music in your iPhone at home?

I plug it into my radio speaker through the aux in cable in my living room.

The trend is towards capped usage, which is a shame. Unlimited data was the norm in the US until recently.

As an American who living in Canada though, you guys are screwed beyond belief. My girlfriend pays for internet BT THE SERVICE. I think the android plan allowed twitter/AIM/Facebook, and BlackBerry was email/bbm or something. That's the kind of thing Americans only imagine as a dystopian future: http://www.microsiervos.com/images/TieredInternet.jpg

Yes. I'm the in UK and I have unlimited data (+calls+texts) for £12/month.

Bands now have a strong reason to get very spammy on twitter. Hope it doesn't go the way of MySpace, which ended up being LinkedIn for people who want to promote their band. (there was a lot of other things wrong with MySpace, but when it just became a bunch of bands spamming each other, anyone who wasn't a band had little reason to be there anymore)

Can you play full songs from Spotify on the app with a standard Spotify account? Since the Spotify app only allows full catalog access on mobile devices with a premium subscription, it seems strange that they would allow the Twitter Music app to do this.

Why all the hype about Twitter Music app? I just don't get it. Can someone please explain?

It seems to me like Google Drive all over again, nothing new to see but since its a big company launching something, hype!

Have you played with it? Until today all we really new was 'Twitter is launching a music app/service'.

It won't let me connect my Spotify account. I'm going to assume it's from so many people trying to do the same thing. Looks interesting from what little I can do with it without the connection.

still not exactly sure what it does. it pulls music from other services based on trending stuff on twitter? who would want that? so much hype for nothing...

Not live. Techcruch did not get paid properly I guess

Not live for me, what does everyone else find?

Apparently, it's later today. I guess it's tomorrow for japanese :)

Yeah I think Twitter originally announced only that it would be going live today (http://gma.yahoo.com/twitter-music-app-launches-for-iphone-a...) and Techcrunch has paraphrased that poorly.

Edit: added 'Today' to title to clarify.

Crappiest launch ever?

Public facing landing page for about a week that asks you to sign in then just does nothing, not even an error?

Can't even be arsed looking at it now after that mess.

From the blog post:

"You can download Twitter #music from the App Store today, or enjoy the web version, which will be rolling out over the next few hours: music.twitter.com."

So the web component will be rolling out later today. The app is available and working.

Edit: It's now working for me https://music.twitter.com

I also found that infuriating. Maybe management is working the engineers really hard or something. It just seems weird that they couldn't even implement the most basic handling for a view that only contains a single button.

Amazing app....i am lovin it

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