#music #fail

Twitter's new #music service uses your social network to crowdsource recommendations for you.

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

The idea behind Twitter's new website (and iOS app) seems to make sense, albeit as a latecomer to a saturated arena. However, it's based on a number of flawed notions including a reliance on Spotify or Rdio that ultimately undermines it completely.

It requires the following to be true:

• Users follow or want to follow the artists they like.
• When hearing a song they like, a user's first thought would be to tweet about it... but not save it in any other way.
• Twitter has a reasonable chance of guessing the music you like through who you follow.

I don't believe any of these hold.

The first two aren't insurmountable problems and I'm sure features to address the second issue will come soon... but the third point is critical.

On Twitter, I follow professionals related to my career, I follow celebrities, scientists, politicians and musicians related to my interests and hobbies and I follow real life friends and other online acquaintances.

Some of the people I follow are huge music fans and some of those might have the same taste as me, but ultimately Twitter has no way of pulling any signal at all from that noise. In fact, you'd be considerably better off starting a dedicated second Twitter account for #music and ONLY following artists you like from that one.

More fundamental even than that though: you need to use Spotify or Rdio to even listen through the service... at all.

Guess what problem Spotify already solves without any help from #music?

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