Twitter released their new music discovery app, Twitter #music today, currently only for iDevices. In a world crowded with all kinds of music services how does this new one from Twitter stand out? Well, let’s take a look.

As you already know, there are many other services out there such as Pandora (great for instant playlists and background music), Spotify (to hear something specific), and iTunes and Rdio and Xbox Music and many more. The new Twitter #music puts more fun into music discovery and offers a good looking user interface.

Launch the app and log in with your Twitter account, you can check out accounts of artists you follow. The app presents four categories: Popular for the most viewed songs, Emerging for not so popular artists, Suggested showing musicians recommended specifically for you by Twitter, and there’s also #NowPlaying for checking out songs shared by the people you follow.

The songs are arranged in a grid showing album covers and just tap on an artist to listen to a sample of their music via iTunes. You will need to connect with Spotify or Rdio if you want to listen to the full song. If you want to purchase the song all you have to do is tap the iTunes button. As you will see in the video below, the whole experience is pretty smooth.

The app is certainly very easy to use and it doesn’t overwhelm you with stuff. It just brings to you tracks the people being followed by you have tweeted, and just one song per artist.

Is it perfect? Not exactly, though it is a solid first effort. They can surely improve some things on the new app such as the search function which won’t allow you to search for songs. It’s just for artist profiles.

Check out the video below and Twitter #music is available here on the App Store. An Android version is expected to be available sometime in the not-too-distant future as well.

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Recently Virgin mobile released a plan with Spotify to give you more access to the music you want, when you want. The Spotify subscription includes other mobile features such as data and call, but obviously the main attraction is the built in use of Spotify’s premium features.

The biggest and most well-known feature of Spotify premium is to access all the available music on the go, straight from your smartphone, and today we’ll be looking at what the Spotify Android app has to offer.

The Spotify Android app gives us quick access to more than a life time’s worth of music, no matter the genre. The application has been designed with simplicity in mind, and it’s clear that this design has stayed true throughout the application.

The front page gives us access to the most popular new releases, as well as downloadable playlists created by our Facebook friends, as well as their most listened tracks. You’ll also see your listened music posted to facebook, making it extremely easy to share new sounds through your social sites.

If you’re looking for a certain artist or album, the search engine can help you to pinpoint exactly who you’re looking for. The search will look through song, album and artist names, but for those looking for a certain genre of music, the search bar is a little lacking, and you’ll find search results based on the title information.

The radio station helps to remedy the above problem though, by allowing you to search for stations dedicated to certain genres, or an artist’s name, a station will be created with songs matching the genre of the information you’ve provided. The radio station feature is very similar to the workings of Last.fm, and to integrate them both into a music experience on the go, you can collect your scrobbling information straight from your last.fm profile to use in Spotify radio.

If you can’t access the internet whilst out and about, Spotify mobile allows you to download playlists straight to your smartphone. Whilst browsing music you can long press a song to access options such as ‘share’ ‘add to’ and ‘star’ to make finding your favorite music easier later on, but most useful is adding your music to playlists, allowing you to download almost every song you could need to listen when offline.

Spotify is all about giving the user control over what they listen to and how, and the Spotify app for Android follows suit. You have control of audio quality, crossfading, radio stations, playlists and a whole lot more. Spotify has really strived to make listening to music a much simpler experience, and although there is a price to pay for premium services, it is very much worth it.

Download Spotify from the Google Play store here.

Please visit http://www.virginmobile.com/vm/home.do for mobile deals.

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