Twitter confirms music app

The best new music in the world right now’ will be available on Twitter ‘soon’, the site has confirmed

The site updated its music.twitter.com page to confirm the long-running rumour. It now reads ‘coming soon’ and invites users to sign in. Once authorised by users, the ‘Twitter #music web’ service claims it will offer “the best new music in the world right now”.

As is usual with such apps, #music will be able to read a user’s tweets, see their followers and post tweets. Currently, however, users are met with a server error when they elect to ‘sign in’. It is listed as “By Twitter, Inc.”

Last year Twitter bought music discovery site We Are Hunted, which is now shutting down. On its website it says, “There’s no question that Twitter and music go well together. Artists turn to Twitter first to connect with fans, and people share and discover new songs and albums every day. We can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on at Twitter.”

Asked what the sites are working on, the company adds “We wish we could say but we’re not yet ready to talk about it. You’ll hear more from us when we are.”

Last week, it was reported that users will be able to watch music videos from Vevo, which hosts music videos from major record labels, and listen to clips from SoundCloud, a website where users can upload and share their audio recordings. The app is likely to open separately from Twitter.

US Pop Idol host Ryan Seacrest has also confirmed the existence of Twitter’s new app on Thursday via a tweet. He said he was “playing with @twitter’s new music app (yes it’s real!)… there’s a serious dance party happening at idol right now”.

Reports suggest the app will offer personalised suggestions to Twitters 200million users, who send on average two tweets a day, and could be announced as soon as Friday.

Twitter will hope to challenge the dominance of services such as Spotify, which has collaborated closely on integrating its services with Facebook. Apple is also said to be aiming to bring a music service to the market by integrating it with iTunes.