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When the buzz is music

It should not be much of a surprise that Twitter Music has landed near the top of the iOS free app charts. With its immense audience, Twitter can easily be a kingmaker and is riding a wave of success coming off its quirky video segment app Vine. Vine strikes at Twitter’s roots as a consumer-driven communication tool, abbreviating video as tweets abbreviate text to create a new form communication.

Twitter Music, however, capitalizes on Twitter’s role as tastemaker and news breaker. It is a digital Billboard rankings with samples — except we already had such a thing in the iTunes store. The difference is that iTunes allows only purchase via Apple whereas Twitter Music allows listening to full songs via Spotify or Rdio. Today, it’s not a compelling offering, but it’s out on the open Web. As was the case with Facebook’s push into music via Spotify, Rdio and others, it adds more push to those services whereas Twitter gets to flex its muscles in more structured use of its data as well as continue its long practice of capitalizing on celebrity usage of the service.