In probably the worst-kept music industry secret of the year, music discovery site We Are Hunted has finally confirmed it has been acquired by Twitter. The news was announced, naturally, via a tweet from We Are Hunted’s official Twitter account. The company then said the wearehunted.com site was shutting down, as are all its user accounts.
“There’s no question that Twitter and music go well together,” runs a statement on We Are Hunted’s site. “Artists turn to Twitter first to connect with fans, and people share and discover new songs and albums every day. We can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on at Twitter.”
AllThingsDigital suggests that, now the We Are Hunted news is confirmed, things are going to move at a rapid pace and that Twitter Music will go public today (Friday) – or possibly over the weekend (to coincide with the Coachella festival). It adds that the music app will work by collating a series of “personalized signals” from users’ tweets and then suggest music and artists based on that information.
Clips of recommended tracks can be played (via SoundCloud and iTunes integration) and videos will come via Vevo – and they will all be accessible within tweets without users being taken to outside sites or players. The existence of the new Twitter music app was ‘confirmed’ by none other than Ryan Seacrest who (of course) tweeted “playing with @twitter’s new music app (yes it’s real!)…there’s a serious dance party happening at idol [we presume he means American Idol] right now”, adding that it shows what artists are trending on the app.
Welcome to Twitter! “@wearehunted: We want to share some news with you. We Are Hunted has joined Twitter. wearehunted.com”
— Twitter Comms (@twittercomms) April 11, 2013
How this all works in the field will be the decisive factor and Twitter has plenty of experience with promoted tweets. But while Twitter likes the obvious revenues from promoted tweets, users are not always convinced, arguably regarding them as intrusive. Is music going to escape the same fate here and be a great place to discover music? Could the app come with nicely measured or incessant sales messages to buy downloads, tickets, merchandise and more? Or is what has happened on Facebook with music – where details of what friends are listening to gush out – mean that things just get lost in the Niagara of general posts that pour down users’ walls?
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