New Twitter Service Hopes to Capture Musical Trends

Twitter’s music service is no longer just for Ryan Seacrest.

A week after teasing the Internet by giving celebrities like Mr. Seacrest a first look to test it or, most likely, to build up a ready set of excited endorsements â€" WAY TO GO YAY !! :) â€" Twitter has granted all 200 million users access to its much-anticipated music service, which suggests songs to listen to by scanning the service’s posts for music references.

As described in a company blog post Thursday morning â€" and evident form a quick test drive â€" the service, called Twitter #music, appears to be much as expected. After signing up, a user is sent to a page with various charts of artists and songs. The #NowPlaying list collects songs that have appeared in Twitter posts among the people a user follows. Others show what is popular everywhere on Twitter, and the emerging chart promises to reveal the “hidden talent found in the tweets.” Artists’ accounts also highlight the music they follow.

Twitter’s blog post was written by Stephen Phillips, a founder of We Are Hunted, a service that performed a similar function by recommending music based on social-media chatter; Twitter recently bought the company and put its people to work.

The music on Twitter’s service is available on the music page or embedded in tweets, and plays through three online music stores: iTunes, Spotify and Rdio. An Twitter music app for Apple devices was also released on Thursday. Short clips from iTunes are the default setting, but subscribers to Spotify and Rdio can link their accounts to play full songs. Twitter’s blog post says other services are likely to join; one likely candidate is Soundcloud, which has been called the YouTube of music for its ability to allow easily uploads of audio tracks that can be shared across the Web.

The idea of recommendations through social media connections or Internet buzz is hardly new, even for music: it plays an important role on Spotify and Facebook, and has been the basis of music discovery sites like the Hype Machine and Last.fm for years.

But Twitter has an advantage in sheer size, as well as the inertia factor: if its 200 million users can find music to listen to â€" and buy through iTunes, or stream by paying Spotify or Rdio â€" right on Twitter, why would they leave?