Social media giant Twitter unveiled its most recent feature today - #music. The app streams music and uses people’s tweets and overall activity around an artist or song to gauge their popularity. Much like Twitter itself, really, except the app is focused squarely on music artists, instead of, say, the latest political event or youtube sensation.

The app is another step in twitter’s bid to control a larger share of the social media market by getting people to spend as much time as possible on their site. As a promotional tool, it might be extremely useful for artists and companies to distribute music through Twitter’s word-of-mouth type setup. It's essentally Twitter, streamlined specifically for music. It has a number of curious features, such as the The app works with iTunes, Spotify and Rdio to integrate audio previews and full songs. #music also offers users the chance to check out some of their favorite artists’ favorite artists, essentially creating a social networking branch based squarely around music.

Twitter Founder Jack Dorcey, Innovator of the Year Awards
Twitter founder Jack Dorcey attends the Innovator of the Year Awards at the MoMA

The company rolled out the app today only for iPhone users and only in a limited number of countries - US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, however the company plans to expand to Android and a number of additional countries soon.