Twitter’s music app is beautiful, in that now-tiresome way apps from VC-backed companies are required to be, sacrificing utility for aesthetics and looking dated as soon as it hits your neighborhood app store. That’s fine, they’ve got plenty of designers to restyle it every 18 months.

Mechanically, it works quite well, exactly what you’d expect a music app on an iPhone today to be, down to properly responding to the standard library of earbud remote shortcuts. As of 1.0.3, it’s plenty stable, less buggy than you might expect given the general unreliableness of networks and streaming media. Linking an Rdio or Spotify account is seamless, and a clever runaround of what would surely be a thorny negotiation with the music biz, to boot.

The Popular pane is useless to anyone over the age of 17. Emerging seems to simply be the inverse of Popular and is therefore equally hopeless. Swipe over to Suggested and we’re finally getting somewhere, save for the fact that the secret sauce of what makes an artist “suggested” is completely opaque. I have no idea1 what I should do to improve the algorithmic guidance or what the fuck @beth_orton is doing in there.

Tellingly, you can’t get to a musician’s tweets from within the app to decide whether you want to follow them based on the content of their stream, you’re just supposed to follow all of your favorite musicians and be in awe of their celebrity, I guess.

The # NowPlaying pane gets to the heart of what’s really wrong with the app and, may I suggest, Twitter circa 2013. In order for this 25% of the app to be useful, the people I trust and follow must also auto-tweet what they’re listening to, complete with hashtag detritus (or trolls). Perhaps I’m just too far past what Twitter considers cool, but a stream littered with # NowPlaying refuse (or Vines or Foursqure check-ins, for that matter) is a sign that I need to spend some quality time with the unfollow button. Twitter has built an app that requires users to abuse their timelines and followers with machine tags without any meaningful way of tuning out that noise.

Worse still, a recommendations engine built on top of who I follow on Twitter is not solving the problem of introducing me to new music, it’s reminding me how many of my friends have terrible taste (relative to my obviously awesome library, natch). Context matters, it’s why the intersection of my sets of Rdio and Twitter friends is actually pretty small and that’s ok. Again, maybe it matters to tweens that your best friends are also totally into @OneDirection or whatever but that’s no way for anyone past puberty to live.

Sadly, the music app also says plenty about where Twitter is going. They long ago gave up any pretense of subverting the mainstream, cozying up to the likes of MTV and NBC, and are now fully focused on being yet another megaphone for the world’s already over-exposed. Let us welcome our new new media overlords, same as the old overlords, it seems.

You can see how this plays out: more hashtagged “verticals” for # tv # movies # celebrities # gossip #news2 # food #etc, more courting verified b-list celebs, further metastasizing our streams. If you were wondering how Twitter was planning on paying back the more than $1 billion in venture capital they’ve stacked up, while also minting another generation of Silicon Valley [b|m]illionaires, here’s a clue.

Of course, it’s their prerogative3 to be an adjunct to and tool of the mainstream media. Let’s just not confuse the story of what Twitter is today with something that continues to be interesting.

It seems like the suggestions algorithm is keyed to the musicians you follow on Twitter, since that’s pretty much the only meaningful metric Twitter has bothered to tap into. I only follow two musicians: Aimee Mann, because I think she’s hilarious and she likes my polititweets; and John Roderick, a pal from Seattle who for some dumb reason doesn’t merit the proper “musician” badge. ↩︎

The events of last week and how poorly they were covered on Twitter (and the tired old dogs like CNN being wagged by Twitter’s tail) should disabuse anyone of the notion that a Twitter news app is anything resembling a good idea. ↩︎

As of press time, @KingBobbyBrown remains unverified, which is a god damn shame. ↩︎