Twones: A Social Music Feed (500 Beta Invites)

The more that music moves online and is consumed in streams from multiple sites, the harder it is to keep track of what you listen to across the Web. A startup from Amsterdam called Twones is trying to make sense of all the noise. It acts as a social music feed of everything you and your friends are listening to, as well as a library of your favorite songs. It is in private beta, but the first 500 TechCrunch readers to enter the code “tc_inv08” here will get an invite.

The first thing you do when you sign up for Twones is install a Firefox add-on that keeps track of every song you play across 20 music sites and services, including youtube, myspace, imeem, last.fm, iLike, hype machine, mixwit, seeqpod, skreemr, and deezer. On Macs, it also records what you play on iTunes.

Every song you listen to then is displayed in your personal music feed. As you add friends, you can see what they are listening to as well. And for each song, you can add a comment, recommend it, or put it in your library. When you click on an individual song ling, you get taken to a dedicated page for that song with a YouTube video, Flickr photos, Twitter mentions, a list of similar artists from Last.fm, links to albums from that artist on Amazon, and a list of all your Twones friends who have listened to that song.

The only thing that Twones is missing is the music. Other than embedded YouTube videos, to actually play a song you have to click through to the original music service where it was streamed from in the first place. Twones is more about trying to capture the musical meta-data of the Web, socializing around music, and organizing it. The service would be a lot more compelling if you could also play songs without clicking away, and create playlists, etc.

It is a lot easier to get excited about music if you can hear it. If they can figure out how to embed more music directly in the site, Twones could be a hit.

Twones Video Demo from Twones on Vimeo.