Twitter Music

» see music.twitter.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

by 2013 i was on twitter for the dev feed and not much else. twitter music never reached me. it was an ios-first app tied to a spotify or rdio account, and neither service had a clean turkish presence at launch in april 2013. spotify did not show up here until late that year and rdio never properly did. the app shipped at coachella with the assumption you already had one of them paid for.

the product came out of twitter's late-2012 acquisition of we are hunted, an australian music aggregator that scanned music blogs and twitter feeds for a rolling top-99 chart of new songs. twitter pulled that chart logic in and bolted it onto artist follows. the app told you what people you followed were listening to plus what was trending across twitter overall. you tapped a song and it played through whatever streaming account you had hooked up.

twitter pulled the app from the app store on march 21, 2014. the service shut down completely on april 18, 2014, one year to the day after the coachella launch. kevin thau, the vp who spearheaded the we are hunted acquisition and led the launch, left twitter on april 24, 2013, one week after the product shipped. that is roughly when this kind of product gets to live, and twitter music did not get to live for long after.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

the launch was loud. ryan seacrest had early access. every music journalist with a beat to fill wrote it up. the app sat at the top of the music charts for a few days in late april 2013. then it sat there. then it did not.

~ how it actually ended ~

the app was passive in a moment when passive was no longer interesting. it told you what trended. it did not let you reply to a song or embed cleanly back into the timeline you already used. it did not survive without an active subscription to a service most people outside the us did not pay for. by july 2013 daily users were a fraction of opening week, and the headcount on the team was already drifting elsewhere inside twitter.

~ the funny part ~

twitter then bought revue in 2021 and killed that in 2023 in a louder act of brand removal. the music app was the polite practice run. twitter's pattern with non-core products was already visible in 2014: ship loud, walk away once the metrics flatlined.

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