Twitter adds charts to help find music you actually want to hear
A new genre-based discovery feature should help Twitter attract more users to its 2-month-old music app.
Twitter is now helping guide users of its music service to the types of music they want to hear.
Thursday, Twitter Music, the 2-month-old Web and mobile streaming service powered by Twitter activity, was updated with a discovery feature called charts, which offers people a genre-based approach to music listening.
With charts, Twitter Music users can now select from Twitter-generated playlists based on music genre and find special types of charts, such as "Popular" for new music trending on Twitter or "Superstars" for new tracks from hit artists. Following the Twitter Music formula, tracks are featured based on their Twitter popularity in terms of tweets and engagement.
The new options greatly expand upon the previous selection of listening choices, which let people explore new music, listen to suggested tracks, or tune into just the artists they follow on the information network.
The addition of genre-based listening potentially corrects for a flaw in Twitter's initial music strategy. The service, which connects to Rdio and Spotify to let people listen to full tracks, isn't meant to replace those streaming services, but instead act as an automatic playlist-generator, introduce people to new tunes, and help them find (and follow) their favorite artists on Twitter. The previous options, however, didn't allow people to just tune into their favorite flavor of music.
Twitter has stayed quiet on the success, or lack thereof, of its digital music app. Anecdotally, buzz about Twitter Music has appeared to drop off since its mid-April release. The service's brightest days are still potentially ahead of it as Apple intends to incorporate Twitter Music into iRadio with the release of iOS 7 this fall.