According to startup nowPlaying.fm, Twitter users post 650,000 tweets per day that contain the hashtag #nowplaying, followed by the name of a song to which the user is currently listening. There's only one problem: These tags rarely contain a link to the song, so other Twitter users can't go listen to it themselves.
NowPlaying.fm hopes to change that. It's a music search-and-play service in the style of GrooveShark or the late Imeem, which was absorbed into MySpace Music earlier this month. But it connects to Twitter to share the music you're listening to with the entire Twittersphere -- not just as a title, but as a playable song link.
It works like this: You sign up for a nowPlaying membership. You login to nowPlaying's website and search the site's database of music. NowPlaying displays 10 search matches and lets you ding any which aren't the right song match for your search, in order to improve the system's accuracy over time. You can play these songs, or add them to playlists. (NowPlaying doesn't host the music files. It uses APIs to find the songs on other services.)
Whenever you play a song on nowPlaying, it sends a tweet through your Twitter account that includes not only the song title, but a #nowplaying hashtag (Twitter hashtags don't care if letters are capitalized or not), followed by a link to the song on nowPlaying.fm. If another Twitter user clicks the link, the song plays.
NowPlaying, a 5-person, privately funded startup in Jersey City in the state of New Jersey, is currently in an invite-only beta period. For now, founders Brandon Harris and Ryan Dreissig say they're still researching how best to make money from the service. "We would like to eventually make deals with companies like TweetDeck and have them use our service as a music sharing add-on," Harris mailed me. "Like other music services, a freemium model is very much in the works."