Twitter is and for the foreseeable will be a communications powerhouse. An incredible quantity of information is shared via Twitter every second, including a lot of music sharing. Yesterday alone there were over 18,000 proactive music shares on Twitter (or about 12 songs per minute), excluding auto-tweets and srobbling, and this rate continues to grow exponentially. But despite this fact, no one is using Twitter to actually discover music. As Billboard recently reported following the NPD/NARM survey on music discovery, “Twitter is not a common activity after music discovery.” Only 2.2% said they checked Twitter after hearing a song they liked and only 12% said they visit an artist’s Twitter page after discovery.

We know from experience that the problem is not lack of content online as we have identified over 12 million songs that are shared on Twitter. The problem is actually a combination of three other factors which we call distraction, inaction and fragmentation:

• Distraction: Today’s social networks just don’t cut it for it for music, and both music and the people who share it are getting lost in the clutter. Twitter was built for information sharing, not music discovery, and it is impossible to filter out all the other Twitter noise that is going on in addition to music sharing.
• Inaction: Even if you do Tweet about a song, what do you do with it?  Tweets are they stand are text-based and not actionable, making it nearly impossible to get from Tweet to listen.
• Fragmentation: Finally, because individual consumers typically share music on not just one but multiple services, i.e. using SoundTracking on their iPhone while using Pandora during the workday, music discovery is fragmented. Back to our 18,000+ shares, only Ping and SoundTracking have market share greater than 20% of shares with Pandora, LastFM and Spotify all falling in the 13% – 14% range. The irony is there is a lot of music being shared on many different channels but this quantity and clutter actually creates increased noise which hinders and even prevents music discovery.

The fact remains that Twitter is a hugely popular communications tool but it misses the boat in terms of music discovery. As Billboard pointed out, if Twitter “wants to take advantage of music consumers’ post-discovery interest, it needs to be more than plain text.” People just aren’t using Twitter for music discovery because of all the distraction from non-music related Tweets, its inability to convert Tweets to listens and the total fragmentation of the market. Both music and the people who share it are getting lost. Isn’t it about time for an interface built specifically for music discovery? Stay tuned.

When I read that radio is still the most popular way people discover music you could’ve knocked me over with a feather from Larry the Twitter Bird. Slipping outside of our frictionless, socially connected world, it’s not entirely surprising.

First let’s establish that the lack of music discovery over social channels isn’t due to a lack of content. We collect, match and normalize 12 songs a minute that are shared on Twitter.

Digging deeper into our stats we see different music being shared depending on the time of day or day of week. Regularly at 7PM Eastern Time there’s a spike in Chicano Rockabilly music shared while songs from Lady Gaga’s new Christmas release were consistently amongst the top shared last week.

In addition to date and time factors, we notice many people are sharing from multiple services. We see people sharing music on Pandora during their working hours and then move to Soundtracking for their evening sharing. The recent rise of services to share music has had a dramatic effect in the increased amount and variety of music shared. Whether you’re looking for Rihanna, Avicci, Adele, or Los Locos Del Ritmo, their music is being shared and waiting for you.

But sharing is only one portion of the music discovery equation and frankly it’s the easy part. The easy and instant communication provided by Twitter makes it a great way to recommend music to friends and family. Hey here’s a Tweet about a song I like. See not hard at all, but what do you do with it?

There has been alot written about Twitter as a music discovery tool. Most recently, that Twitter is not being used for music discovery. We’d love to know what you think.
How do you discover music?

Last week Music Ally asked if we would do a comment piece for their newsletter. We’re all big fans of Music Ally, so of course jumped at the opportunity.

Thanks to innovation and advancements in technology, how we communicate and share information has changed drastically. In a few short years, communication has changed to a constant stream of mostly unfiltered information. Not that many years ago, generations were excited about the advent of the telephone and color television as the latest ways to share and communicate. Now, a single generation later we have e-mail, SMS and most recently status updates through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Human connections and sharing of information and content is no longer restricted by time or geography.

Once we entered the digital age, the medium and channels changed. As the barriers of communication have dropped, the amount of information shared grows. With digital, communication is no longer a one to one exchange. E-mail and SMS channels offer a flow of information from one to a few. To filter the flow of information and provide context, many people have multiple email addresses – one for personal communication and one for professional.

SMS or direct messaging is the easiest and fastest ways to communicate. Barriers of time and geography have almost disappeared. The only real restriction is cost.

Enter the “social” era. In less than a decade the way we share information, whether personal, professional or otherwise, has been completely revolutionized. With the pace and effect technology has on our day to day lives, it was only a matter of time. There isn’t one cause you can point to. Yes, Facebook and Twitter have made it possible to stream your conscious to thousands or even millions of people instantly. Without Apple creating a consumer friendly smart-phone and tablet, Facebook and Twitter would be restricted to the desktop.
Now that we have this means of streaming all of our thoughts in bite size pieces to millions of people instantly for free, what’s next? Like creating multiple e-mail accounts, people use different social networks to filter their audience and message. Is that enough, or are getting more information then we bargained for?

With the flood of smart-phones, tablets and laptops, information is coming at us faster and in greater volume than ever before. Social networks offered a way to share relevant information with friends, family and co-workers. Today we also share with people we’ve never met who may live on the other side of the world. All of this information is too much to handle. Forget “too much information,” we are in a world of “too much sharing.” The adage, “sharing is caring,” may still be true, but it needs a new home.

In many ways, people are still trying to create some order in all the information chaos by managing their personal and professional connections separately. How many times have you heard someone say that they use Facebook to keep up with friends and family and manage their personal relationships, while they use LinkedIn for business and networking purposes to manage their professional relationships? Twitter seems to straddle both worlds, with people tweeting interesting articles and facts to share but others also using it to discuss what they are enjoying for lunch at this very moment.

Today it’s easier than ever to share information, and multiple channels have developed to help us share that information. People are using different types of networks to communicate based on the type of information they want to share. With all of this sharing, what you really care about at this very moment (as the sharer or receiver) is lost.

Take music for example. Music is and always will be a social experience. Music transcends cultures, demographics and geography. The combination of music and social sharing just makes sense. More people are sharing their music experience online than ever before. From attending concerts with hundreds or even thousands of fellow music fans to making mix tapes of favorite songs for friends, consumers have always wanted to share their personal music experiences with others. These same connected devices we use to be social are also our media players. Thanks to services like Music WithMe, Google Music and iCloud we can listen to all of our music where ever we are, any time.

The good news is that it’s easier to share our musical experience than at any other time in history. Some of Facebook’s millions of users use this network to share music with their family and friends while record label executives and others tend to share articles about music with LinkedIn’s more business-focused users. And both groups use Twitter and YouTube to get their music out. All this happens with a whole lot of extra noise and clutter.

Both music and the people who share it are getting lost. The bad news is that all this extra noise is distracting. Today’s current social network options just don’t cut it for music. Do I really want to know what each of my friends is listening to on Spotify right now? No. The problem remains that even within music, some shares are more “meaningful” than others. You can’t help but like some people’s tastes more than others. Just because a friend shares a song, you don’t necessarily want to hear it.

Do we need another social network entirely? Maybe, but I don’t want to re-create a new social network and invite friends again. I would like a way to filter these streams of information by my interests. A place where I can discover new music without sifting through status updates on sushi and party pictures. Maybe even then, I could tune in to people who share music that I like without knowing what they ate for breakfast.

This next communication era will be about filtering noise and dropping more barriers. Music does transcend geography, gender and language. Once I can filter music from the rest of the stream of conscious, I can add new streams from people who may not even speak the same language as I do.

As we try to make order out of the chaos in our ever growing world of information, new channels will develop to help us consume information we care about. We dream of the day when you can just focus on the music and tune out the rest…

I was listening to music people share through twitter on play.withme.com and started wondering. The people who share music, do they also follow the band? If someone likes a song and are willing to expose their softer side and open themselves up to ridicule from friends (see my shares), they must be a big enough fan to follow the band.

 As it turns out, people who share music do not follow the band. Take Alicia Keys for example. She has 4.7 million followers. That’s alot right? Of the people who share her music 71% do not follow her on twitter. After a bit more digging, we found 85% of people who share music on twitter through Pandora, Soundtracking, Slacker, or other services do not follow the artist.

85 percent! That’s a big number. For an industry looking for better ways to connect with fans, finding the other 85% of fans that promote your music is a good start. No matter how many followers you have today, you are missing the ones that matter most. The people who expose and influence their friends music. You are more popular than you think. If you only knew who liked you.

If you are a band or artist, what’s your Alicia Keys factor?

Hot on the heels of our Sync To Desktop release, the Music WithMe team has released a new Android version for the weekend. Yep Lover Boy got it right and we’re hoping its going to make your weekend even better.

The first thing you’ll notice is a new Discovery screen. We know that sometimes, the firehose of music shares can be tough to digest. So we added a shiny new filter to narrow down what music is popular amongst everyone or just your Facebook friends and people you follow on Twitter. Who knew Burning Spear were so popular amongst my friends. I mean I guess I should’ve suspected since @mathiask struts around in his rastastic Etnes. Jah!

Speaking of Twitter, now you can simply add your account to see music shares by people you follow on Twitter without first adding a Facebook account. You can, of course, add a Facebook account anytime you want by going into settings from the menu option with Music WithMe.

Lastly, to tap into your voyeuristic tendencies, you can now see a full list of songs a person has shared. Check it out by selecting a song and then tap the People tab in the preview screen. Click on a person’s avatar to see and explore all the songs they’ve publicly shared. It’s strangely captivating. Personally I’ve discovered 3 new artists today just serendipitously clicking around: Deerhunter, The Helio Sequence and The Horrors.

We hope you like it, now get out there and share your weekend music discoveries with us.

Full release notes:

• Quick Tweet Love and Now Playing now require for twitter screen names (so your followers can see what you shared)
• Can get friend shares by connecting to Twitter OR Facebook, was just Facebook.
• Fixed a now-playing bug on the Sync screen.
• New filter on the Discover page (for popular or all).
• No longer shows desktop helper status when sync is not enabled.
• Fixed bug in Sync-to-Desktop preferences.
• New ability to see what music a person has publicly shared.

Today is a big day for us at Music WithMe. Since our inception, we’ve been working to close the gap between music access, discovery, sharing and acquisition.  Sounds like a big hairy goal. Turns out it is.

With this latest release in the android market today, music purchased on your smartphone is automatically synced back to your desktop and added to iTunes. Pretty cool eh? ”Why is that important?” you might wonder.

Many people have told us they love the new discovery features which let them see what their friends are sharing on Pandora, Rdio, Last.FM, etc. But after they discover the song and purchase it, the song is locked on their phone. “What happens next?” we asked.

Well if you’re like most of us, you stopped buying music on your phone because it was stuck there. Now, when you purchase that song you just discovered, it’s not only on your phone, but back in iTunes waiting for you at home. Note: because we’ve added features to the desktop version, you’ll need to “Check for Updates” on your desktop helpers to get the latest version.

Now that Music WithMe goes full circle letting you access your music anywhere, share and discover music with your friends over e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, SMS, Google+… and sync purchased music back to your desktop, that doesn’t mean that we are done. More great things to come.

Stay tuned

Though it’s still hot, hot, hot where the Music WithMe offices are located the end of summer is rapidly approaching and I’m already feeling a little nostalgic. To hold onto that “summer fun” feeling here are 5 of our favorite songs about summer.

1. Summer Love by Justin Timberlake
This is a ridiculously catchy song about, well, summer love.

2. Summer in the City by The Lovin’ Spoonful
Beloved classic about the magic of the big city in the summer.

3. Summertime Blues by Eddie Cochran
It’s hard to reconcile “summer” and “blues” but Eddie Cochran managed to do it.

4. Summertime by Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff
Sets the perfect mood for cruising around the city with the windows down as the sun is setting.

5. Summertime by Kenny Chesney
Same name, very different sound. I think I might like this song better in winter though because it’s got the nostalgia tinge to it. What do you think?

Code named “Nada Surf” Music WithMe 2.3.0 is being released today. “Nada Surf” has a few new features we think you’re going to really like. All of them are centered around making it even easier for you to discover music that you’re going to love.

1. Popular
We’ve added a new way to sort shared music: popularity. The Popular tab consists of the most popular recently shared music. We use a song’s social engagement (things like tweets, comments and plays) to determine its popularity.

The most popular shared music is now also viewable on preview pages.

2. See what your friends are sharing on other services like Soundtracking and Pandora.
When we determine popularity and when we show your friends shared music we’re no longer showing you only what has been shared using Music WithMe. With this release we’ve integrated Soundtracking and Pandora shares. And we’ll be adding other services soon like Last.fm. to give you the most complete and up-to-date picture of music being shared.

3. Find Out Who Is Sharing
We’re also now letting you know who shared music. Both on the web preview pages and song previews within the Music WithMe app you’ll now be able to see who has shared a particular song. This is the first component of some cool stuff we have coming soon. Here’s a hint at what we’re up to: We’re going to make it easy for you to find and follow music sharing influencers you trust who aren’t yet in your social network circles.

4. Redesigned Preview Pages
We redesigned our web preview pages to be cleaner and more focused on giving you the audio previews and YouTube videos for the music you’re discovering.

5. Rdio Support
In addition to the new features we’re also rolling out support for Rdio with this release. Now you can share the music you’re listening to with the Rdio Android app.

6. Live Support
Now when you visit music.withme.com or launch help from the Music WithMe app during our standing support hours (9AM-4PM EDT) you’ll have the option of live chatting with our customer support staff. Our support staff is small so occasionally you may get the notice that we’re offline when the queue is full but in that instance you’ll leave a message for us and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

On Friday we released updates to the Music WithMe helper apps for Mac and Windows. The updates were different for each platform but both fix recently discovered issues that were negatively impacting our users’ experience with Music WithMe.

On the Mac side of things we fixed a bug that was preventing some users from being signed in. If you were a new user who had only ever installed the most recent version of the helper app and you chose “Keep Me Signed In” you were never actually being signed in. Users who had used previous versions of the helper app and updated to the latest version were not affected by this bug.

For the Windows helper app we fixed a bug that was causing information about changes in iTunes to not be communicated to Music WithMe. This communication breakdown disrupted the syncing process. Basically the syncing process for selections that were made after the bug “locked” the existing iTunes information was either significantly delayed or never completed so our users weren’t getting the music they wanted on their device.

We’re very sorry for the inconvenience these two bugs were causing. We’re also grateful for the users that brought these issues to our attention so we could quickly roll out these fixes. If you were experiencing either of this issues updating to the latest version of the helper app should fix things for you. If not or you have any other questions or issues using Music WithMe please email help@withme.com and our customer support team will get back with you soon.

For most of us Facebook is a trusted network of friends and family where we feel comfortable sharing content. That’s why Facebook was the first social network we integrated into Music WithMe. We realize though that there are different kinds of friends, different kinds of trusted networks and even different kinds of relationships within those networks. And since we know that people who discover and share music actually buy much more music than other people it’s clear to us that our job is to empower you to share and discover music across the various networks you use from the people you trust.

We’re releasing Music WithMe 2.2 today and it marks a great leap forward in our journey to make your social music discovery options much more open. With this release it’s now possible to see music your Twitter friends are sharing even if you aren’t connected to them on Facebook. But (and this is why this is just the first step in our Twitter journey) you and your Twitter friends must both be Music WithMe users and Facebook users, even if you aren’t Facebook friends.

Here’s a handy stick figure drawing our co-CEO Terry made to illustrate the idea:

In case the drawing isn’t 100% clear (or, as my old band director used to say “it’s clear as mud”) let me put it into words.

You are a person who uses Music WithMe, Twitter and Facebook.

Your friend is also a person who uses Music WithMe, Twitter and Facebook.

You follow your friend on Twitter. Your friend may or may not follow you on Twitter, it doesn’t matter. As long as his Twitter account isn’t private you’ll be able to see music he has shared.

If your Twitter friends aren’t using Music WithMe yet we’ve added a shortcut for inviting your friends to the menu on the Music WithMe homescreen.

This release also brings with it a few bug fixes and updates. Namely:
- Playlist download complete notification now launches your default music player on click
- Certain Samsung devices that were having music downloaded to internal storage will now have music downloaded to the SD card
- Preview pages for songs now display the number of times the song has been previewed