Experts atwitter over app to jazz up social media

Marie Szaniszlo

Experts told the Herald yesterday that Twitter’s plan to roll out a music app in the next week could rock your social-media world.

“Listening to music is innately social,” said
Max Wolff, senior analyst at Greencrest Capital. “This is becoming one of the new, important services that all the big players want to offer.”

The new app would recommend artists and tracks based on the behavior of your Twitter account, specifically who you’re following and what you tweet about. The app would also let you play music clips.

“It makes a lot of sense for Twitter because they have a huge amount of real-time data about what people are listening to,” said David Gerzof Richard, founder of BIGfish and professor of social media and marketing at Emerson College. “Twitter is a 24-hour focus group that’s pretty reflective of society as a whole. ... You can turn that into a revenue stream with advertising.”

Twitter has stayed mum about the new app. But in a blog post Thursday, We Are Hunted, which tracks songs on social media, announced that it had joined Twitter.

“There’s no question that Twitter and music go well together,” the post said. “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.”

Speculation that the app could compete with the music-recommendation service Pandora sent shares of the latter down nearly 3 percent by the close of trading yesterday.

A Twitter music app could also lure users away from Spotify, a commercial music-streaming service that can be accessed through a Facebook account.

By adding music services, the goal of both Facebook and Twitter is to make it unnecessary for users to go anywhere else, Wolff said.

“They all want to become the supermarket for digital services,” Wolff said. “It’s quite possible (the Twitter app) will be successful. The question is how desirable is it for people to have all these things on the same platform.”

Last October, Twitter acquired Vine, a mobile app that allows users to create and post short video clips.

“Twitter is clearly going multimedia,” said Todd Van Hoosear, owner of Fresh Ground, a Cambridge social media consulting group. “It makes a lot of sense. Sharing music on Facebook wasn’t that exciting. Will Twitter be any different? I don’t know. ... If they are, I’ll be the first in line to try it.”

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