Jawbone launches Drop, a playlist service that lets friends suggest songs through Twitter

It looks like Jawbone is preparing to launch a new music service, called Drop, at Twitter’s Flight mobile developer conference today. Based on Jawbone’s own description, Drop would let users play music with their Spotify or Rdio subscription and then solicit song requests from their Twitter followers.

Update: Drop’s website is now live, and it includes a download link for the iOS app (no news about Android so far). At today’s conference, Jawbone described how Drop makes use of Twitter’s new Fabric SDK to enable its integration with music services.

Using tweets makes it easy for anyone to suggest music – no one needs to have Drop installed other than the person playing the music. This should make it easier, for example, to manage a playlist at a party where you don’t know what everyone wants to listen to.

We first came across the service after the official Twitter Flight account asked attendees to request songs for the event. After I suggested a song, Jawbone’s Drop account responded with a link to drop.jawbone.com.

We managed to find what appears to be a test version of the service. The interface allowed me to choose a song to drop as a tweet to a specific user. Clicking on the link from my iPhone took me to the Twitter app with a pre-composed tweet.

Here’s the official description of Drop from the page source (which refers to an iPhone app, but not Android):

DROP by Jawbone plays an instant mix based on your favorite songs from Spotify or Rdio, and take song requests from your friends through Twitter.  Reply back with a song you want to play!”

Evidence suggests Drop arose from Playground.fm, a playlist service that Jawbone acquired late last year. Interestingly, the Playground.fm site appears to be down right now.

We’re still piecing together how Drop will work, but we don’t have long to wait, as Jawbone and Twitter will likely unveil the service at Flight today. We’ve reached out to both companies and will update if we hear back.

Read more: Twitter introduces its modular SDK, Fabric for Twitter feeds, ads and crash tracking

➤ Drop

Image credit: Jason Wurtzel