For something so essential to most people’s lives, combining music with social networking in a deep and meaningful way has proven surprisingly hard. The original MySpace was on the way to figuring it out when everyone bailed on it for Facebook (although the new MySpace does it great, but hasn’t yet reached critical mass), Facebook managed to shit the bed harder on music than any other aspect of its service (aside from maybe its privacy policies), and no ground-up music-based social network, like SoundTracking or Apple’s Ping, has ever caught on.
Rumors about Twitter getting into the music-discovery game have been going around for years, and after a few weeks of heightened chatter they launched Twitter #Music earlier today. Despite the name (which provokes a reaction about halfway between “ugh” and “of course”), it’s actually pretty great.
