As it has turned out it seems people don’t actually really care all that much what their friends are listening to or what their favourite celebrities on Twitter are liking. This didn’t stop the media however frothing at the mouth when it was revealed Twitter were releasing a music product called Twitter Music.
What seemed like a potentially great music product actually turned out to be a lacklustre one when it debuted. After purchasing We Are Hunted which was a pretty decent music discovery platform that showed you what was popular across the web, Twitter closed it down after purchasing it for an undisclosed sum believed to be in the tens of millions of dollars and then had the team implement parts of WAH into Twitter Music.
A few months on and everyone has all but forgotten about Twitter Music. Ask most daily users of Twitter if they are even aware of the fact Twitter have a music product and you’ll get a resounding no from most. And of those that have heard or know of Twitter Music most probably don’t even use it.
It seems everyone is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t need solving: social music discovery. It’s a competitive niche that Twitter sadly tried attempting to enter half-heartedly and that in turn coupled with the fact it is rather limited to Twitter itself and not the wider web like We Are Hunted was is the reason it has failed.
So what have Twitter got out of this? Besides a great team of developers and a once-great product with endless potential, they have nothing much else. They should have kept Hunted the way it was and somehow managed to tie it in with Twitter, but made it not just limited to Twitter.
