Twitter has bought music discovery tool We Are Hunted, and is primed to unveil its own music app any day now, Billboard reports.
Twitter Music's launch was rumoured to coincide with the Coachella festival in the US, which is going on right now, but Twitter is yet to lift the curtain. The app is already in beta though, with celebs singing its praises in tweets.
We Are Hunted was a San Francisco-based start-up that tracked the most popular songs across the Internet and social media. It said in a statement on its website: "While we are shutting down wearehunted.com, we will continue to create services that will delight you, as part of the Twitter team. There's no question that Twitter and music go well together. 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."
Some industry bigwigs literally couldn't wait, like American Idol judge Ryan Seacrest. (He's a bit like a US version of Simon Cowell, but more toothsome and less oleaginous.) He tweeted: "playing with @twitter's new music app (yes it's real!)… there's a serious dance party happening at idol right now." He followed it up by saying he was "lovin the app", that it "shows what artists are trending" and it "also has up and coming artists". Two thumbs up, then.
Twitter Music is likely to rank trending artists in charts, using a tile-based UI much like We Are Hunted's. According to designer Youseff Sarhan, you'll be able to connect Twitter Music to streaming services like Spotify and Rdio. Which could mean Apple's much-rumoured iRadio has some serious competition when it launches this summer.
What would you like to see from Twitter Music? Can it drown out Spotify? And where does it leave Apple's streaming plans? Let me know in the comments, or on our Facebook page.