Initial Impressions…
http://music.twitter.com

It’s has the potential to be a nifty tool for a musical tweets catchup (provided you don’t want to hear full tracks). Spotify is very broken for me right now and don’t have a premium account either, so haven’t tested their integration for “full tracks”. This may cause me to break down and try rdio too.

WAYYY too “in bed with” iTunes imho. Where is bandcamp, youtube, vimeo, hypemachine, soundcloud? I’m thinking it’s just a huge iTunes revenue stream for twitter/itunes. But I could be wrong about their closed-doors arrangements? In my opinion truncated previews are the WORST way to be introduced to an artist. I’ll take videos, user-videos, soundcloud streamable singles etc… any day over this default of horrid iTunes preview clips.

Everything that was “streamable” in media form within an expanded tweet should be playable (in full) within #music. But it’s not.

Not to mention, where are the generated links for buying physical (CD/vinyl)? I’m sure the artists would appreciate that!

Or some kind of gig integration? All those tweets about where folks will be playing are entirely missing from #music. Ideally it could figure out when they overlap my location? Nothing is preventing this from a technical perspective with geo-located tweets and browser geolocation.

I follow hundreds of musicians with my @clickysounds twitter account, yet my “songs from tweets from artists you follow” only has 9 entries? I find that hard to believe, any one account when expanded has a page full. Maybe only 9 that it could correlate to iTunes tracks? Maybe this tweet to track correlation algorithm will improve slowly over time? Or maybe it’s exluding artists on this page, and only including normal twitter users? Saw accounts for labels and blogs there among the 9 tracks listed.

It took me a while to figure out where to click to drill down into the tweet, that is where all the good info hides besides just the audio. Use it!

On the positive note, the suggested artists bit did dig up a few I should have already been following (long time fan). Maybe less will slip through now? But the follow buttons seem kinda broken on the suggested artists page?

And the absolute best thing, is it’s ability to filter any twitter account to a listenable radio station, especially great for discovery if you bother to glance at the accounts of your favorite artists (who actively also share what they like!).

95% of my online discover right now is coming from ThisIsMyJam. I don’t see #music changing that in a hurry.

I’m sure it’s 10x more fun with full-length integration. But if I’m gonna spend $$/month for music i’m gonna try my best to buy an LP directly from an artist at a show or through bandcamp. If I wasn’t into vinyl I’d be doing the same but with FLAC downloads on bandcamp. I only resort to iTunes when all other routes are exhausted or non-existent (or I’m impatient/devoted enough to pay for something twice! ) ;-)

Does #nowplaying tag have special behaviors associated with it now? Should I be using that for all my music tweets to get me into the associated interfaces of people who follow me?

Also, why is absolutely nothing about the tweet I create FROM #music streams, freaking streamable back on twitter!?!??! Not even a link back into #music. Just a boring unplayable (without tons of work) itunes embed.