Twitter to pull #music app from App Store, shut down services in April [u]

By AppleInsider Staff

After a year-long run, Twitter #music will be pulled from the iOS App Store on Friday, while the corresponding service will shut down in mid April.

Twitter announced the impending death of its #music experiment in a tweet on Friday, just hours before the app is expected to be pulled from Apple's iOS App Store.

The app, first introduced in April 2013, was meant to leverage Twitter's massive installed user base to create a content discovery service based on crowd-sourced recommendations.

With #music, users were able to listen to snippets of new tracks from popular artists, as well as those from up and comers recommended by the system's algorithm. The Listen Now feature hooked into iTunes, Rdio and Spotify to stream content.

In addition, listeners could follow official artist pages to see what bands they enjoyed. Like Apple's erstwhile Ping social music network, Twitter's #music was an apparent flop.

As of this writing, Twitter #music is still available for free from the App Store, though operations powering the service will shut down on Apr. 18.

Update: The Twitter #music app is no longer available on the iOS App Store.