Twitter Launches Its #Music App

Twitter, which released its music application to a handful of celebrities last week, announced today on Good Morning America and via a blog post that the rest of the world can now pile in. Twitter #Music will be available starting today at http://music.twitter.com and as a separate app for the iPhone through the App Store in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.

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The application, as previously reported, lets users discover music through artist and others' tweets, listen to their music using Spotify or Rdio, check out their concert dates, watch their videos on YouTube or Vevo and buy songs via iTunes; the company said in the blog post they will "continue to explore and add other music service providers." There is no Android app yet, though the company said in the blog post that "over time, we will bring the service to Android as well as to more countries."

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The #Music app is based on four pages or tabs, which you can swipe through to access. The Emerging tab shows "hidden talent found in tweets," while Popular page displays music that's trending across Twitter. The other two tabs focus on who you follow and your personal music taste.

Twitter Music is yet another attempt by the platform to branch out beyond the confines of its self-imposed 140-character limit and delve into the world of richer media. In January, it released Vine, a video-blogging app that lets users capture and post videos lasting six seconds or less. A year ago, it bought Posterous to help enhance its photo-sharing capabilities.

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The free music app, available on both Web browsers or on mobile devices, is a separate download from the main Twitter platform. Instead of showing all updates, the music app presents a subset of the main Twitter stream that’s related to artists and their music. And instead of showing trending topics for the entire Twittersphere, it shows charts of trending songs, albums or artists.

The charts are based upon technology developed by We Are Hunted, a small Australian company that Twitter recently acquired and relocated to San Francisco.

Twitter: @billboardbiz