Not at all surprising, given that this news was leaked all the way back in October, but pretty disappointing: Twitter's #Music app is officially dead.
The company announced, via a tweet, that the app is going to be removed from the app store, and will no longer work after April 18th, which, perhaps not coincidentally, is the app's one-year anniversary:
Later this afternoon, we will be removing Twitter #music from the App Store. If you have the app, it will continue to work until April 18.
— Twitter Music (@TwitterMusic) March 21, 2014
Twitter's #Music app ultimate point seemed to be to get music that artists themselves recommended on Twitter.
It's #NowPlaying feature allowed users to see the songs that had been tweeted by the artists and people they follow on Twitter. Another feature, called Suggested, analyzed the artists a user followed, in order to recommend songs it thinks they might like.
Users could also listen to music from artists that other artists follow. For example, if someone was following rapper Wiz Khalif, users could then search his name, then tap one of the artists Khalif is following and then start listening to their music.
It allowed subscribers of Rdio and Spotify to log in to their accounts and stream full tracks through Twitter. The app premiered right after Twitter bought music discovery service We Are Hunted.
The app was initially popular, reaching the number 6 for overall free app downloads in the App Store, but it quickly fell off. As of the end of August, it was ranked at #1672 in the App Store, according to Onavo, while App Annie has it at number 267 in iTunes. So, yeah, it was not exactly lighting up the charts.
The writing on the wall was there when Kevin Thau, who was the Head of the #Music app, abruptly left Twitter to join Biz Stone's mysterious Jelly startup only a month after the app debuted.
According to the reports from last year, the app was developed in isolation and was never fully integrated into Twitter.
The failure of the #Music app does not mean that Twitter is going to be giving up on the music space. In fact, the company made it very clear in another tweet that there is more music integration to come:
We continue to experiment with new ways to bring you great content based on the music activity we see every day on Twitter.
— Twitter Music (@TwitterMusic) March 21, 2014
In September of last year, the company hired Bob Moczydlowsky, the former senior vice president of product and marketing at Topspin Media, as its new head of music. In his new role, Moczydlowsky was put in charge of handling music partnerships, as well as hiring two new deputies who will handle artist relations.
Last month Twitter entered into a partnership with music industry firm 300 Entertainment in order to gain deeper insights into how users interact with music on the site.
So, there's plenty more in Twitter's pipeline, despite the failure of #Music.
(Image source: showlove.co)
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Startup/Business
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Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
