Remember when Twitter bought Australian-founded We Are Hunted, whose creators then built Twitter’s #music app, which was initially super popular in part due to its cool design and the fact that everybody uses Twitter, but then it ran into a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem?
Near the beginning of that process, We Are Hunted put its Spotify app on hold, presumably because Twitter wanted its own Spotify app, and didn’t want to confuse things by offering two different music charts.
On Thursday afternoon, Twitter released its own Spotify app (Spotify link), bringing two of the biggest brands on the internet together. Twitter’s Spotify app plays all of the music it lists, for free, if you have the desktop version of Spotify (the standalone version of Twitter #music linked out to Rdio and Spotify, but this app is arguably more seamless). And of course these are not lame 30- or 90-second samples — these are the complete songs.
Twitter’s Spotify app slices the music it sees #nowplaying on Twitter, as well as on other sources like blogs, into five chart pages using the same graphic-intensive grid format that helped make We Are Hunted so great to begin with: Superstars (“new music from the superstars”), Popular (“new music trending on Twitter”), Emerging (“the best new emerging music”), Unearthed (“hidden talent found in the tweets”), and Hunted (“popular music on blogs”).
We can never have too many ways to discover music, and Twitter sees a slice of it that nobody else does. Connecting that to Spotify makes sense, especially for Spotify subscribers, because they can harvest the best of what they find on all of these charts into their collection, including on portable devices (i.e. not just the computer).
You can turn any of these charts into a Spotify playlist with a single click; if you then transfer that to your portable, you have fresh batches of music to discover at your leisure. And these charts are different from, say, Billboards. Yes, you get your Miley Cyruses and Katy Perrys in Popular and Superstars, but for those of us who prefer something a bit more adventurous and outside the mainstream, the other three categories (Emerging, Unearthed, and Hunted) offer a solid alternative.
Of course, none of these charts respond to your own particular taste (i.e. what you’ve collected in Spotify), but that’s the point of charts — to look the same to everyone. If you’re looking for a particular kind of music, Twitter’s Spotify app also slices up music by radio-style genres: Alternative, Country, Dance, Electronic, Folk, Hip Hop, Metal, Pop, RNB, and Rock.
One tip: If you do a lot of exploring in this app, as with any Spotify app, you might want to activate Private mode first. Otherwise, your friends will think your digging (as in enjoying) the stuff you’re only just digging (as in crates).
