Apps, Mobile & SMS

1 Month After Launch, Twitter #Music App Is Officially A Flop

image from www.billboard.comJust a month after launch, Twitter's entry into the music space appears to have fallen flat.  As if today, the app languishes as the 113th most popular free iOS music app.  To provide perspective as to how poorly that means #Music is doing, several years after launch Spotify and Pandora remain #1 and #2; and something called Sing! Karaoke is the 9th most popular free music apps.

Perhaps even worse, none of the tastemakers and musicians that I follow appear to be using the #Music app.  And if they are, they are not tweeting about it.

Even if #Music was a disappointment, it was a cheap one – a one-inch
punch that Twitter could toss into the world and let succeed or fail on
its own terms," writes Russell Brandom in The Verge. "It's the kind of thing
image from www.hypebot.comgiants like Google and Facebook do
all the time, but Twitter has only recently come around to."

Perhaps. But it would be sad to see the interesting music discovery tech developed by We Are Hunted and bought by Twitter to power #Music, go to waste.

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3 Comments

  1. Bruce, I’m curious about why we are all so fascinated with this tech.
    We Are Hunted was not a success.
    Aweditorium was not a success.
    Twitter #Music was not a success.
    This team (the We Are Hunted team) has yet to build anything ‘successful’ with this core tech, even standing on the shoulders of a giant like Twitter. I’m not a hater (actually a fan of their products for my own reasons). But I’m wondering why some of us humans continue to believe in this team / music discovery product in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
    Why do you think this is? Do we just want others to be as into music discovery as we are? Is that simply not possible?

  2. My guess would be that the We Are Hunted team realized an opportunity long before it was made public by a Nielsen report in August of 2012 that stated music discovery is still dominated by traditional FM format. There has yet to be a competitive social media product that can rival people’s preference to discover new music on the radio.
    I’m not sure what WAH’s financial goals were, but that had to be pleased with their .:software development:. Something I feel they were still in the process of when twitter came by and waved a juicy carrot in front of their faces. I, like Tembo, have an affinity for WAH, also for my own reasons, and was anticipating good things from their growth.
    That being said I find Twitter #Music to be laughable. Radio on the internet, been there done that. The discovery technology is lost on the masses and it essentially provides little more than an alternate route to top 40 format.

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