playing with @twitter's new music app (yes it's real!)...there's a serious dance party happening at idol right now 
 
 — Ryan Seacrest (@RyanSeacrest) April 11, 2013 
 
 Man this new Twitter music app is insane! 
 
 — Wiz Khalifa (@wizkhalifa) April 13, 2013 
 
 Hey @twittermusic thanks for sending me the new music app... Y'all are the shit! 
 
 — Blake Shelton (@blakeshelton) April 13, 2013 
 
 playing with this new @twittermusic service. this is going to be really cool for music discovery when it's released 
 
 — ŦҤE GŁłŦ₡Ҥ MØB (@theglitchmob) April 12, 2013 
 
 Just got the Twitter #music app!! WAIT til ya see this shit!!it's epic! 
 
 — TOMMY LEE (@MrTommyLand) April 15, 2013 
 
 Twitter has some insane things in the pipeline. The new twitter #music app is big! Shout out to my peeps over at twitter ;) #HUGE 
 
 — Ne-Yo!! (@NeYoCompound) April 15, 2013 
 
 trying out the new @twittermusic service... it's really fantastic.gonna be huge! 
 
 — Soft Reeds (@softreeds) April 12, 2013 
 
 just listening to @jamesblakeon @twitter's new music app. not sure when it launches, but it's a really interesting music resource. 
 
 — moby (@thelittleidiot) April 16, 2013 
 
 Loving the new app by Twiiter #Music.I think this is gonna revolutionize things real fast... 
 
 — Nikki Sixx (@NikkiSixx) April 16, 2013 
 
 Thanks to my friends @twittermusic for sharing your new app and connecting us thru music. Congrats! 
 
 — Jason Mraz (@jason_mraz) April 16, 2013 
 
 Today, we're releasing Twitter #music, a new service that will change the way people find music, based on Twitter. It uses Twitter activity, including Tweets and engagement, to detect and surface the most popular tracks and emerging artists. It also brings artists’ music-related Twitter activity front and center: go to their profiles to see which music artists they follow and listen to songs by those artists. And, of course, you can tweet songs right from the app.The songs on Twitter #music currently come from three sources: iTunes, Spotify or Rdio. By default, you will hear previews from iTunes when exploring music in the app. Subscribers to Rdio and Spotify can log in to their accounts to enjoy full tracks that are available in those respective catalogs. We will continue to explore and add other music service providers.So, if you’re interested in the songs that have been tweeted by the artists and people you follow on Twitter, you can navigate to #NowPlaying to view and listen to those songs.Or if you’re scrolling through a chart and you want to learn more about a band, like Chvrches, you can tap their avatar to see their top song, follow them right from the chart, or tap their Twitter username to go to their profile.Or if you want to listen to music from the artists Wiz Khalifa follows, you can search for his name using the search icon in the top right corner. Then tap one of the artists you’re interested in and hit the play button to begin listening, or press play on the player to listen to all the artists.And as you discover new songs that you want to share with your followers on Twitter, simply tap the spinning disc in the lower left corner. This opens the player, and you can tweet from there using the Tweet icon in the top right corner.You can download Twitter #music from the App Store today, or enjoy the web version, which will be rolling out over the next few hours: music.twitter.com . Right now, the service is available in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Over time, we will bring the service to Android as well as to more countries.Twitter and music go great together. People share and discover new songs and albums every day. Many of the most-followed accounts on Twitter are musicians, and half of all users follow at least one musician. This is why artists turn to Twitter first to connect with their fans — and why we wanted to find a way to surface songs people are tweeting about. We offered music artists an early look at the service. You can see some of their reactions below. We hope you like it, too.Posted by Stephen Philips ( @huntedguy Founder, We are Hunted ||||| Twitter #Music got its big public debut today, and at first blush the service is visually impressive, and well-designed with smart, opportunistic integrations. Those integrations, with Rdio and Spotify, completely change how the app works for users who have active accounts with either service, vs. those who don’t. And the biggest winners here might just be Rdio and Spotify, since the app experience reinforces just how strong they and other discovery services like Songza really are. 
 
 Consider that without Rdio and Spotify, you’re not going to be able to access full tracks through Twitter #Music, only 60-second iTunes previews. That means you can’t just set it to play for a certain category and leave it on the background, without having an extremely jarring experience. Instead, you need to actively monitor what you’re listening to, making it the opposite of a lean-back experience. 
 
 Second, you can use Twitter #Music without a Twitter account, but you’ll be limited in terms of what you see. That’s because your recommendations, when not culled from the general public data of top trending artists (the “Popular” tab) or up-and-comers (“Emerging”), is instead drawn from the pool of artists you follow on Twitter. It turns out I follow exactly zero artists on Twitter music, and that’s not surprising, given that I use it primarily for work. You can rectify that in-app, but only by following artists on Twitter through it; they’ll show up in your standard Twitter feed, too, and there’s no way to keep them separate or quiet that noise. If you’re not interested in Top 40, or in what Twitter IDs as “emerging” talent, you might find yourself at a loss as to what to do in the app. 
 
 Even if you have Spotify or Rdio access, and your music tastes agree with Twitter’s, or you follow a wide range of artists, you’d still probably be better served going straight to the source. Rdio and Spotify both offer their own charts, as well as recommendation tools like albums identified as in “heavy rotation” among your network, which is built separate from your network on either Twitter or Facebook, which means you can build it exclusively to reflect people with similar musical tastes, instead of for more general purposes. Plus, with those subscription streaming services, you can access playlists curated by others for nearly any genre, mood or topic you can imagine. 
 
 Going even further afield to something like Songza, which is pure recommendations, you find even better discovery tools. Being able to drill down by mood and genre makes it so that recommendations on Songza feel a lot more varied and spontaneous, but remain more focused on areas you’re likely to enjoy. It also features full tracks by default, and is available on iOS and Android, as well as desktop. 8tracks offers a similar experience, and is also available across all three platforms. New entrant Piki from Turntable’s creators is also a strong contender, with a social network also based solely on musical taste, where you can build your own network by selecting from users within your Facebook or Twitter networks, or outside of those within Piki itself. 
 
 Twitter #Music is great-looking, both on the web and on the desktop, and it works well enough once you have an active Rdio or Spotify account. In that regard, it’s very good for Rdio and Spotify, since it should funnel new users to those services. And it’s very good for Twitter, since it essentially becomes a big potential ad platform targeting music labels, which have money to spend. Plus, as I quickly found, it should drive users to follow new artists if it doesn’t annoy them into shutting down the app instead. But for the average user looking for a way to discover new music, the field is rich and Twitter #Music’s current capabilities are relatively paltry. ||||| You no longer have to be Ryan Seacrest, Ne-Yo or Jason Mraz to play with Twitter's new music discovery app. After testing the app with music artists and influencers, Twitter #Music will be available starting today at https://music.twitter.com and as a separate app for the iPhone through the App Store. 
 
 So what does the service do? Well, it does what you might expect from a music app from Twitter -- it helps you find music that's popular on Twitter and music based on the bands you follow. The app is centered around four pages or tabs, which you can swipe through to access. 
 
 View photo . (Courtesy: Twitter) 
 
 The Popular page shows you new music that's trending across Twitter while the Emerging tab shows "hidden talent found in tweets." While those two parts feed you information about what the collective Twitterverse is jaming to, the last two focus on who you follow and your personal music taste. 
 
 The Suggested tab shows artists you might like based on the artists you follow on the service and who they follow. And finally the #NowPlaying tab shows songs your friends are listening to or tweeting about. For instance, if your friend tweets that they are listening to a song by Justin Bieber, that song will show up on that page. 
 
 The iPhone app, which ABC News' Good Morning America got an early look at, has a clean and polished design. All the pages have a grid made up of artists and songs; tap one of those and the song willl start playing along with a fun spinning CD animation in the left corner. Tap on that and you get an enlarged CD -- you can drag your finger around the CD to fast forward or rewind within that song. 
 
 RELATED: Vine: Twitter's New App for Adding Six-Second Videos to Your Tweets 
 
 And the fact that you don't have to leave the app to listen might be one of the best parts. Twitter has integrated current music services like Rdio, Spotify and iTunes to allow you to play the songs right through the app or webpage. With iTunes, you will only hear a preview, but with Rdio and Spotify, users can log in with their accounts to hear the full tracks. Twitter says it will continue to work to add additional music providers to the app. 
 
 Twitter also put artists and bands at the center of the experience. You can go to artist's Twitter profile pages within the app and see what artists they follow and listen to. As Twitter says, it's like getting recommendations from your friends, except they happen to be music superstars. You can also search for artists through the search field and play a selection of songs from them. 
 
 Twitter announced last week that it had acquired "We Are Hunted," a music recommendation and streaming company based in Australia. Twitter also released Vine, a dedicated six-second video app, in January. 
 
 "There are times when you need a single-purpose driven knife in the kitchen and there are times when you are out camping and you want a swiss army knife. We have different apps for different purposes," Michael Sippey, Twitter's VP of Product, said earlier this week at the "All Things D: Dive into Mobile" conference when asked about the different apps Twitter has been releasing. Last week Facebook released Facebook Home for select Android phones. Home provides a Facebook experience deeper than an app. 
 
 The Twitter #Music app will be out later today in the Apple App Store; there is no Android app yet. ||||| To say that Twitter Music is debuting today would be to discount the man hours Ryan Seacrest and other celebrities have spent assaulting their earholes with it. But, as shared on Good Morning America, Twitter's music service has finally arrived on the web and on the iPhone for the common man. 
 
 So what are we in for? 
 
 There's not much to it, according to the initial reveal, or at least not much that would surprise you. Four screens help organize your music discovery and sharing: Popular, Emerging, Suggested, and #NowPlaying. Popular is what's trending, Emerging reveals "hidden talent"—though it's not at all clear how they become unhidden—Suggested gives you, well, suggestions based on whom you follow, and #NowPlaying reveals the terrible music choices the people you follow are making, in real-time. 
 
 Twitter Music will be a separate app on iOS, not folded into Twitter Prime. And on the web it will exist as four tabs. It's still very much a Twitter experience—you can tweet songs out from within the app, and go to the profiled of people you follow to see what they're listening to—just very narrowly focused around tunes. 
 
 But where does that music come from? When you're poking around at songs within the app, previews will be supplied by iTunes (because then you might buy them!). If you're a Spotify or Rdio subscriber, though, you can log in to your account and listen to full tracks, assuming they're available. That should cover most streaming music enthusiasts, but don't lose heart Mog-ians! Twitter says it's exploring other partners. 
 
 Presumably Twitter's engine is built on that of We Are Hunted, a service that scoured the internet to find out what people were listening to until Twitter bought it recently. And if Ryan Seacrest and Ne-Yo and Moby are to be relied upon (and you should, with your life), it's been pretty effective so far: 
 
 Twitter has some insane things in the pipeline. The new twitter #music app is big! Shout out to my peeps over at twitter ;) #HUGE — Ne-Yo!! (@NeYoCompound) April 15, 2013 
 
 playing with @twitter's new music app (yes it's real!)...there's a serious dance party happening at idol right now — Ryan Seacrest (@RyanSeacrest) April 11, 2013 
 
 just listening to @jamesblakeon @twitter's new music app. not sure when it launches, but it's a really interesting music resource. — moby (@thelittleidiot) April 16, 2013 
 
 Now let's pause for a moment to picture those three in the same room making conversation. 
 
 Got it? Good. 
 
 The most appealing part of Twitter Music at first blush seems to be the easy breezy discovery of what complete strangers—some of them famous—are listening to at any given moment. Less appealing? The fact that it's cordoned off as a separate app (or browser tab). I'm sure there are dozens of logistical and UI reasons for that, but it seems like a big ask to open a separate app to listen to my Spotify playlist, especially when there are so many social options built into Spotify already. 
 
 But we'll see! At the very least it's another music discovery option, and more options are rarely a bad thing. You can play with Twitter Music yourself if you download it right here, and happen to live in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. An Android version—and more countries—will undoubtedly show up somewhere down the line. [Twitter Music via Twitter, ABC]
– Twitter officially joined the crowded world of online music today with the launch of its Twitter Music app. The premise is to help users find music via Twitter in a few different ways—through the bands you follow, what's trending on the site, what your connections are listening to, etc., reports Good Morning America. For now, it will draw from Pandora, Spotify, and iTunes, the company says in a blog post. (Business Insider offers a run-through of how the app works. "It's gorgeous," writes Steve Kovach. It's available on iTunes, but Twitter says an Android version is on the way.) Some initial reactions: Darrell Etherington, TechCrunch: It's "great-looking, both on the web and on the desktop, and it works well enough once you have an active Rdio or Spotify account. ... But for the average user looking for a way to discover new music, the field is rich and Twitter #Music’s current capabilities are relatively paltry." Brian Barrett, Gizmodo: "The most appealing part of Twitter Music at first blush seems to be the easy breezy discovery of what complete strangers—some of them famous—are listening to at any given moment. Less appealing? The fact that it's cordoned off as a separate app (or browser tab)."