Twitter users can talk about their favorite music by tweeting that they're currently listening to a particular song and it's particularly awesome. They will now also be able to stream their favorite songs directly to Twitter from Rhapsody.
The online music streaming service Rhapsody just announced that users will be able to tweet songs straight to their followers on Twitter. U.S. owners of the app will have access to instantly stream 30 million of Rhapsody's catalog of 34 million songs.
To directly stream a song from the app, press the blue Twitter symbol located on the song's album artwork. Once clicked, a window will pop up with a tweet featuring the hashtag #nowplaying, the title of the song, artist and link. You can also customize the tweet to say what you want about the song.
As long as you follow that artist on Twitter, you will see the song appear right in your tweet. The song can be played directly from the tweet by pressing the blue play button, and users can still favorite and retweet it.
#nowplaying Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson on @Rhapsody https://t.co/xOExNKuPME
— Lauren Ashley (@LA_Keating) March 17, 2015
This is the first time a music streaming service has been granted the rights to embed fully licensed songs on a social network for free. Twitter users don't even have to own a Rhapsody account to hear the tweeted songs.
"We wanted to make the experience of sharing music with friends easy," said Rhapsody CFO Ethan Rudin. "Our goal with this launch is to not only help make streaming more social, but also to reinforce that music isn't free — every song played is accounted for and fully paid up."
Previously, when a user tweeted a song, there would be a link redirecting followers to Rhapsody, where they would be asked to sign in or sign up for the service.
"This came together so fast, we're just interested in creating an experiment," Rudin said, adding that he isn't worried about others stealing the idea. "We want [our competitors] to copy us. We're the first people doing this, and we're just relying on the fact that we've been really, really fast."
Rhapsody's announcement came at the perfect time. The SXSW Music festival is just kicking off, giving people the opportunity to tweet songs from their favorite and newly discovered favorite artists.
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Photo: Simon | Flickr
