Tunigo works on Spotify’s platform and also has iOS and Android apps. Tunigo lets users browse Spotify playlists, discover new music and read music reviews.

Tunigo’s app will remain on Spotify and its employees will work from Spotify’s New York and Stockholm offices.

“The acquisition fits into our overall strategy around music discovery, basically helping our users make sense of over 20 million tracks,” a Spotify spokesman told me.

Twitter recently launched its own #Music app, which focuses on music discovery and was built by We Are Hunted, the company that Twitter acquired last year.

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If Twitter succeeds in building a smart music discovery tool with the #Music app — one that tells me what to listen to based on my past listening data and personal suggestions — it could define social music discovery for the mobile user in a way no one else really has. And that would open up a whole new source of revenue for the company.

But these are still really big if’s.

Twitter #Music is a social discovery filter laid on top of paid internet radio. You can log into Twitter Music on either iOS or through a desktop browser, and you’re immediately greeted with four tabs: Popular (Pitbull, David Guetta, and the like), Emerging Artists (random, lesser-known artists), Suggested (artists the app thinks you might like), and #NowPlaying (which displays what your Twitter graph is listening to, with corresponding Twitter avatars.) Under each tab is a grid of songs by different artists, and you can tap individual songs to play them. You have to log into Spotify or Rdio or purchase songs on iTunes to listen to the full tracks.

From a design perspective, the app is beautiful. It’s easy to scroll through music previews and tap to play them, and it doesn’t look like every other Facebook-esque feed app out there. You can see the artist’s image, and follow artists you’re interested in.

But there are several reasons why building this new app an effective music discovery tool will be an uphill battle.

It’s a discovery app, not a listening app

Twitter #Music dramatically and intentionally limits the music that you can listen to in full. The app requires either a paid Spotify or Rdio subscription, or telling a user to download songs via iTunes; it seems most users won’t be listening to full tracks on the app.

A Nielsen study of American listening habits in August 2012 found that 64 percent of teenagers listen to music through YouTube, which is free — but it’s not a listening option on Twitter #Music. And neither is Soundcloud, another free streaming option. Of American adults, only seven percent said they listen to music through Spotify. And of Spotify’s 24 million registered users, only 6 million pay for the service. In other words, we’re not talking about a significant number of Twitter’s 200 million monthly active users.

Twitter friends doesn’t mean music friends

While Twitter’s premise is that you can listen to music your friends are listening to and get music suggestions from people you follow, there’s absolutely no guarantee that my Twitter graph and my ideal social music graph would intersect. Right now, when I open the app and tap on the #NowPlaying tab to see what my Twitter friends are listening to, it’s obvious that while they might have witty 140 character insights, I wouldn’t necessarily attend concerts with them.

What I've learned from Twitter music: The internet has horrible taste in music.—
Josh Petri (@joshpetri) April 18, 2013

The Twitter social graph might be vaguely useful as a rough starting point for Twitter to build on, but it won’t suffice as a long-term solution for the app. Twitter will need time to collect data on the music I’m listening to and previewing through the app to determine which parts of my friends’ musical selections I do like, and the type of music I appear to hate. Then the company will need to serve up a new algorithm for me in the Suggested tab, essentially using cues from me to create the perfect suggestions. Until then, I’ll continue to get suggestions to listen to Hilary Duff, and I’ll have no reason to check out the app. Plus, competitors like Pandora have been working to perfect the perfect music suggestions for years, and remain strong alternatives if I want to stream music while I’m on my computer at work.

Why it could work

However, while I’m a pretty lazy person when it comes to music discovery, I like to know what songs are cool right now. So if Twitter improved the quality of suggestions on the app, and it could actually serve as an app that told me about popular songs, it could be better than anything else out there for average users who aren’t curating Spotify playlists.

Right now, 48 percent of Americans still discover music through the radio, and ten percent discover it through family and friends, according to Nielsen. And while only about 16 percent of internet users are on Twitter, this will undoubtedly grow.

And for Twitter itself? If the move works out, it could be genius from a business perspective.

As the company noted in its press release, music artists are some of the most popular users on Twitter right now, catering to their rabid fans who want information on the artist’s every move. The monetization opportuntiies are almost endless: concerts, tickets, music-specific advertising, deals with Spotify or Rdio, and more.

But the key to this success lies with discovery — the app has to surface good enough suggestions to keep me coming back. And back. And back.

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Unlike other social music discovery tools, Shuffler.fm isn’t basing its findings on your existing tastes, as Last.fm or Pandora do. Instead, it aggregates and organizes content from popular online music blogs, like Pitchfork, TheMusic.FM, Stereogum and many more. Content is then organized by genre-based channels, which also help populate a playlist of tracks you can play back from the bottom of the iPad interface while you read about the very songs you’re listening to.

The idea behind Shuffler.fm is great, since it provides an alternative to algorithm-based recommendations in services like Pandora that often provide quite a narrow view of a user’s listening habits. By using curated blog-posted content, Shuffler.fm allows users to be much more broad in their approach to music discovery while also providing the advantages of some kind of editorial filter to prevent information overload.

Shuffler.fm’s iPad app design is simple, even more so than its web-based version. But through its simplicity it does a good job of getting out of the way of the music while at the same time presenting it in a visually attractive way. The presence of the blog-fueled radio playback interface, with its bookmarking (with a free Shuffler.fm account) and sharing options (email, Facebook and Twitter), also helps ensure that you agree with what you are reading about tracks and that you can share them with friends if you come across something you think they should hear.

That sharing element could become even more integrated in the future, as Shuffler.fm co-founder Tim Heineke told me that there are plans in the works “to connect [Shuffler.fm] more to your current social network of sharing,” but that there’s nothing definitive he can share at this point.

The only thing I’m not crazy about in Shuffler.fm is that to read full articles about the tracks in question, the app uses an in-app browser to direct you to the website of origin. I’ve been spoiled by nicely formatted reading views from apps like Flipboard (for some articles, though not all) and Instapaper. But at least Shuffler.fm is directing some traffic back to the websites that supply its content, which in the end is better than my selfish desire to read things in a slightly more easy-to-digest format.

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Exfm is the free iPhone client for an existing service that started life off as ExtensionFM, a Chrome extension that lets you grab and build playlists out of free MP3s posted to blogs. It also lets you both listen to those and share them on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks.

The iOS app doesn’t let you collect music tracks itself, but it does grab songs you mark as “noted” using the Chrome extension, letting you play them back on your iPhone via streaming over Wi-Fi and 3G.

Exfm scratches a couple of itches that Ping doesn’t: It doesn’t depend entirely on users having a strong network to function, since it gathers tracks for your consideration from music blogs, and it also actually lets you play music from your built-in iPod app and “note” those songs, which means you can share your musical tastes with your social network contacts as you listen.

One of Ping’s greatest weaknesses is that it doesn’t plug in to a user’s actual music library or let her use it easily while she’s listening to music. If I have to go to my library, find the track I’m hearing, and mark it as Liked in the desktop version of iTunes, most of the time I’m not going to bother. If, on the other hand, I can just unlock my iPhone (where I do the vast majority of my music listening, anyway) and, using a single tap, recommend a track, I’m much more likely to participate.

To be fair, Apple did introduce the ability to Like and post comments about songs in the iPod app in iOS 4.3, but it works with tracks purchased from the iTunes Store, which leaves a lot of uncovered ground for many users. Exfm works with anything in your library, and it connects you to Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm friends in addition to those who also use Exfm.

Apple partnering with Twitter to make iOS more generally social is a good idea. If Exfm’s early efforts with its iPhone app are any indication, Cupertino should think about cutting its losses with Ping and teaming up with theses guys to shore up that side of its mobile business, too.

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And yet at the same time, so little has changed. On the surface, Last.fm today doesn’t look drastically different from the product CBS bought. The site has continued to grow slowly and has a fervent user base — but it is fair to say that it hasn’t set the world on fire.

That’s precisely what Matthew Hawn wants to change. At the turn of the year, the former record label executive — a longtime user, former journalist and music junkie — was brought in after a decade working with Universal Music and Sony as head of product.

Now he’s a few months into his role, he has been doing the rounds and explaining his vision for the future of Last.fm. So what is it?

I caught up with him earlier this week to find out — and heard a pretty straightforward message: There’s nothing wrong with our service, but there’s a lot we can do with it.

The way Hawn outlined it, there are several things that Last.fm wants to do.

Be easier

Right now, the site is pretty confusing for new users. There are things that everybody understands (charts, for example) but the idea of the service — that it learns what you like and plays you more of it — isn’t particularly well explained. Great web apps feel like magic, and Last.fm needs to recapture some of that.

Better social

Hawn admits that Last.fm has, in the past, been confused about its identity. A few years ago, before Facebook really cemented itself as the benchmark for social interaction online, the site introduced a number of features such as journals and groups. Now, he says, those elements look pretty crusty, and it’s time to focus. Some of these elements are likely to be shuttered over time in favor of smarter, leaner social links.

“We’re not a social network,” he says. “We’re a service with great social features.” His watchwords revolve around pushing the idea of the “interest graph”: his argument is that the things you like are not the same as the people you know (your social graph). So that, in turn, means Facebook can’t replicate the same taste-making and discovery around music of a site like Last.fm. There’s a gap that can still be exploited. But although he’s prepared to work with Facebook, he’s also cautious.

“Facebook is the Walmart of the Web,” suggests Hawn. Its size gives you distribution that you require; but you have to watch out that you don’t get “chewed up” along the way.

Focus on music

When CBS first purchased the site, it became part of the company’s broad interactive division. The hint seemed to be that the “scrobbling” feature — the mechanism that tracks what you listen to across many different devices — could be converted across other media, such as TV. That dream, which never really felt like the right move for Last.fm’s music-mad team, seems to have been pushed aside. Now CBS owns online video search service Clicker and has moved Last into CBS Radio.

It’s a better fit, but that doesn’t mean it’s a service aimed purely at music obsessives.

Broader

“We cannot just be for music geeks,” says Hawn. So the site is going to combine ease-of-use with improved recommendations and data crunching to make it more than just a haven for the hardcore. There will be more emphasis on live music, more recommendations for festivals and gigs, more ways to encourage people to use the service easily. Although he admits that Last.fm already concentrates on too many things, a broader approach is one that he hopes can help it grow.

Sometimes that can come from surprising directions: the Xbox implementation is now, he says, the biggest source of streaming radio usage for the site. That’s opening up new directions, and new audiences.

Focus on data

Ultimately, Hawn suggests, he’s torn between whether Last.fm is a music service that does data or a data service that does music. Whatever side of the fence he eventually falls, it’s clear that data is a hugely important part of what Last.fm has to work with. It is now able to record listening data from more than 600 different devices and software clients — something that has built up a vast database of listening habits, some 50 billion scrobbles.

The answer, he suggests, may be to see the site not as a competitor to Spotify, Rdio, MOG, Pandora or others — but as the connective tissue that brings them together. It can collect data no matter what service you use, it can feed that data back to make your listening more enjoyable. Tim O’Reilly has long argued that Web 2.0’s real power was data — that “Data is the Intel Inside”, and perhaps now we’re at a point where that is mainstream enough for people to reap the benefits.

These are still early days in the company’s attempt to find a second act. Is this the right way to go?

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