14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter Inc. this week pulled its Music app from the iTunes App Store, offering but a brief timeframe to say your goodbyes if you happen to be a fan of the service. On March 18, those who have the iTunes Music app installed will no longer be able to use it.
A sad tweet from the company that maintains the service informed the masses yesterday that, “Later this afternoon, we will be removing Twitter #music from the App Store. If you have the app, it will continue to work until April 18.”
Case in point, you can no longer find Twitter music on the iTunes App Store starting now. But if you already have it installed, you still have about three more weeks of use to squeeze out of it.
A second tweet from the microblogging service suggests that the company still wants to fulfill customers’ musical needs in one way or another: “We continue to experiment with new ways to bring you great content based on the music activity we see every day on Twitter,” the company said.
Twitter Music has been ill fated since day one, and there aren’t many people who will miss it. Hence the reason why it got removed in the first place.
Announced on April 18, 2013, Twitter #music was described as “a new service that will change the way people find music, based on Twitter.”
The service relied (technically it still does) on Twitter activity to detect and surface the most popular music played. Artists have their music-related Twitter activity posted to the service.
Twitter Music fetches songs from iTunes, Spotify and Rdio. Subscribers to Rdio and Spotify can enjoy full tracks when they log in to their accounts.
The optimistic Twitter also said on launch day, “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.”
The plan sounded promising but apparently the idea of constantly watching your Twitter timeline for music-related info never really took off. One drawback was probably the lack of a proper interface and the confusion regarding how the service actually works. The marketing team at Twitter also never did a stellar job promoting the product.