Twitter today confirmed that it has acquired the Aussie startup, We Are Hunted, a music discovery service – further backing up rumours that Twitter is working on its own music app.
This also means that We Are Hunted is being shut down, Founder Stephen Phillips wrote that “While we are shutting down wearehunted.com, we will continue to create services that will delight you, as part of the Twitter team”.
Rumours of Twitter’s Music surface have been surfacing for a while now, this latest acquisition comes on top of a tweet that ZDnet spotted by Ryan Seacrest claiming that he was using Twitter’s new music app.
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
lovin the app…shows what artists are trending, also has up and coming artists… spinning u now @frankturner
— Ryan Seacrest (@RyanSeacrest) April 11, 2013
A Twitter Music platform makes sense for Twitter, it could make them a complete hub for all media: news, photos, video and now music. This could be the last piece of the puzzle and something record labels will be very excited for. Enhanced Twitter cards could allow people to find music, buy it on the spot and then share it for their friends to see and hopefully follow the same cycle.
As well as music, Twitter has been gobbling up a few companies as of late.
In January last year, it purchased Canada-based Summify, which focuses on news. In November, it also acquired Whisper Systems, a mobile device security company.
If all these acquisitions are anything to go by, we could see some very exciting stuff coming from Twitter in the next few months.
Update: All things D is reporting that we could see the music service launched as soon as tomorrow. The app is said to make artist and song recommendations to users based on metadata including their Twitter feed,and will then use services such as iTunes, SoundCloud, and Vevo to provide track previews and video clips.
