Monstro creates playlists from music shared on Twitter

Monstro is a new, free music service that captures music shared on Twitter, launching today at the SF MusicTech Summit.

Monstro adds a new dimension to discovering music via social media by connecting people, globally, and allowing anyone to share music and listen whenever they like. It searches across multiple online music stores and captures all the music shared on Twitter in real-time. Monstro detects music shared on Twitter via multiple platforms, e.g. Pandora, iTunes, Spotify and Rdio.

So…how does it work? It’s pretty straight forward. You can actually use the site without registering, and most of its features will work. You can simply enter the name of a song, or click on ‘trending’ to see what is being shared.

However, Monstro is all about ‘social’, and to get the most from it and see what you have shared – and what your friends are sharing – it’s best to connect it with your Twitter account.

It’s worth noting that your Twitter friends’ music shares will show up regardless of whether they’re signed up to Monstro or not – it automatically detects any music they’ve publicly shared.

Anyone who has ever shared music on Twitter already will likely have a Monstro page waiting for them as soon as they sign-up. Each person’s page lists all the music they have shared within a playlist. You can personalize your social mix even more by tuning out friends with dissimilar tastes and connecting with those with similar tastes.

You can click on individuals and see all the music that they’ve recently shared, and you can see all the tunes you’ve shared on your own personal tab.

You can click to stream the song within Monstro itself, or you can be whisked off to listen to it on the likes of Rdio. If you’d rather watch the video for the song, you can opt to view it on YouTube, which streams within the Monstro platform.

If you want to see what songs are trending in real-time across Twitter, you can do so. As you can see from this, Adele’s omnipresent ‘Rolling in the Deep’ is presently top dog, whilst the sad passing of Whitney Houston over the weekend has catapulted some of her hits to top trending status.

You can click on individual tracks and see how often they’ve been linked to on Twitter in the past 30 days, and Monstro also links to iTunes and Amazon to buy tracks, hinting at a potential money-earner for the service.

It’s not just about Twitter though. Within Monstro, if you discover a song that you like, you can let your friends know by sharing it on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and even Pinterest.

Monstro sells itself as the first music site to harness the true power of Twitter for music search, sharing and discovery, and it’s an interesting one for sure. It doesn’t have the problem that a lot of new social apps have, namely its content is pulled in from across Twitter and is good to go from day one. It leverages the power of the Twittersphere and it doesn’t rely on a critical mass of users for it to work.

“Monstro fundamentally changes how people discover and share music worldwide,” said Terry Goertz, co-founder and co-CEO, Monstro. “It is no longer tied to where or how you listen.”

“Until now, the Internet has been all about sharing music,” continues Jeff Fedor, Monstro’s other founder. “Sharing is great but there’s another step – discovery. Monstro is like having a whole network of great DJs offering their personal playlists to the world.”

We covered a similar platform for video called Shelby.tv last year, describing it at the time as being like “watching TV or gazing into a magic ball of all the videos your friends post on Facebook and Twitter.” So think of Monstro as a Shelby for the music world.

➤ Monstro