Twitter reportedly readying music discovery service after quietly acquiring We Are Hunted [update]

Twitter has reportedly acquired the We Are Hunted music discovery service and is planning to release a new app focused on music, according to Cnet.

The app will supposedly be called Twitter Music and is expected to arrive on iOS as soon as the end of this month. Cnet claims that SoundCloud will provide the music streaming, while music recommendations will be customized based on Twitter accounts.

We’ve reached out to Twitter and We Are Hunted for comment, but Cnet seems to be pretty sure of itself here. According to the site, the app has four tabs for Suggested music, a #NowPlaying section that tracks the hashtag among your followers, Popular and Emerging.

We Are Hunted was founded in 2008 and specializes in pulling trending music from “blogs, social media, message boars and P2P networks.”

If accurate, the move from Twitter would be an aggressive step in its emergence as a full-fledged media company. The company branched out into video in January with the release of the Vine short video sharing app.

With Spotify, Pandora and Rdio all jockeying for listeners’ attention, the online music space feels a lot like a club right now: hot and crowded with a whole lot of movement going on. Still, no clear leader has emerged and it’s not too late for Twitter to strike up the tune.

Music discovery would actually be a nice fit for Twitter, since all the cool kids are already tweeting about the music they like. Twitter itself has inspired third-party music services like Twitmusic, so the concept is already a proven one. Music is also likely to be an easier vertical to monetize, so a new service/app could offer a more stable business model than promoted tweets and other feed-based advertising schemes.

Twitter’s main service has already reached critical mass, so spinning out separate services that take advantage of users’ feeds and reach has loads of potential, even if it comes as many of the platform’s third-party developers are discouraged by the company’s API policy. We’ll definitely be listening for what’s coming next.

Update: We Are Hunted’s site is currently down. It’s probably just a temporary outage, but we’ve contacted the company just to be sure.

Top image credit: Thinkstock