According to startup nowPlaying.fm, Twitter users post 650,000 tweets per day that contain the hashtag #nowplaying, followed by the name of a song to which the user is currently listening. There’s only one problem: These tags rarely contain a link to the song, so other Twiiter users can go listen to it themselves.
NowPlaying.fm is a music search-and-play service in the style of GrooveShark or the late imeem, which was absorbed into MySpace Music earlier this month. But it connects to Twitter to share the music you’re listening to with the entire Twittersphere — not just as a title, but as a playable song link.
It works like this: You sign up for a nowPlaying membership. You login to nowPlaying’s website and search the site’s database of music. NowPlaying displays ten search matches, and lets you ding any which arent the right song match for your search, in order to improve the system’s accuracy over time. You can play these songs, or add them to playlists.
Whenever you play a song on nowPlaying, it sends a tweet through your Twitter account that includes not only the song title, but a #NowPlaying hashtag (Twitter hashtags don’t care if letters are capitalized or not), followed by a link to the song on nowPlaying.fm. If another Twitter user clicks the link, their song plays.
NowPlaying is currently in an invite-only beta period. The company emailed me a press release about its service this morning, but left a lot of info I’ve asked them for. How do they make money? Can’t Pandora, Grooveshark, MySpace, iTunes, etc., add this feature themselves? I’ll update this post with their answers.
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