March 24, 2014
Twitter will discontinue its #music app on Friday, April 18. Conveniently, April 18 marks the app’s first (and obviously last) anniversary. Yup, Twitter #music is officially dead. As part of the move, the micro-blogging startup has already pulled the free iPhone and iPad application from the App Store.
Whenever a piece of software gets removed from the App Store, it becomes unavailable for download or re-download so folks who plan on continuing to use the music discovery app have better backed it up in their iTunes library on their computer.
If you only keep Twitter #music on your iOS device, transfer it to desktop iTunes by connecting your device to a computer and choose the Transfer Purchases option nested under iTunes’ File > Devices menu…
Twitter broke the news this past Friday on the official @TwitterMusic account [1] , without an explanation given.
“Later this afternoon, we will be removing Twitter #music from the App Store,†reads the tweet [2] . “If you have the app, it will continue to work until April 18″.
So regardless of whether or not you have backed up your copy of the app, it’ll become useless come April 18 as the service itself will cease functioning. At post time, the #music website [3] was still available.
The removal doesn’t mark the end of the road for Twitter’s social music initiatives.
“We continue to experiment with new ways to bring you great content based on the music activity we see every day on Twitter,†another tweet teases [4] . If I were Twitter, I’d simply fold the #music app functionality into the official mobile Twitter apps.
The app was built by the team that created the music-discovery service We Are Hunted. Twitter acquired them in 2012 and subsequently shut down their service.
Though Twitter #music reached the #6 slot in overall free app downloads shorty following its April 2013 debut, it tanked quickly thereafter and has since seen “abysmal†numbers both in iTunes App Store downloads and engagement, according to sources.
Chart via app analytics company Onavo.
The writing has been on the wall for some time.
For starters, Twitter stopped active development on the app months ago. Back in October, AllThingsD [5] first reported of Twitter’s plans to shut down the service.
The app has only received a minor cosmetic update last September . Prior to that, the team added new discovery charts and options , but that was way back in the summer of 2013.
Our own Lory wrote in her review that Twitter #music does its job well as a pure music discovery app. But as a music listening app, she found the software to be chaotic and somewhat hectic due to half-baked integration with third-party music apps.
With that in mind, is it really surprising that Twitter #music has failed to appeal to audiences outside of the Twitter universe?
Are you sad to see Twitter #music go?
I’ve never been a fan myself. With so many high-quality apps available for enjoying one’s music and discovering new tracks in a variety of ways, Twitter #music really fell victim of the classic case of too little, too late.
Links
- ^ @TwitterMusic account (twitter.com)
- ^ reads the tweet (twitter.com)
- ^ #music website (music.twitter.com)
- ^ another tweet teases (twitter.com)
- ^ AllThingsD (allthingsd.com)
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