Twitter has undoubtedly become what many are calling the next big thing in music promotion. There have been several success stories and on the same hand some have been disappointed by the results. If you look beyond individual case studies its interesting to see how artists and fans are using twitter to expose music and what methods are most popular.

RockDex has been tracking millions of Twitter posts as part of our upcoming RockDex Pro edition and garnered some pretty interesting data. We've poured over your tweets and categorized the biggest sources of twitter music discussion and discovery.

First off, a breakdown of all tweet sources. These are tweets containing an artist's name. If the tweet states something along the lines of, "I love Rocket From The Crypt" it is categorized as a general tweet. If the tweet content is "Rocket From The Crypt - Born in '69 http://blip.fm/~8p7l4" it is categorized as a blip.fm tweet and so on. Artists like Cursive, The Streets and Rush were excluded from this study for being overly used in non-music contexts. Click on a chart for a larger view.

You can see that the vast majority of these tweets are general posts about an artist. However 3.6% of all music tweets come from blip.fm and another 5% were from radio stations tweeting what they're playing right now.

If we break this down further we can see what percentage of specialized tweets come from individual sources excluding general tweets. These are tweets posted from social music sites such as blip.fm, The Hype Machine and radio based sites Yes.com and RadioTAGr.com.

Finally here is a chart of specialized tweet sources without radio station tweets. I've excluded radio from this chart because radio tweets don't require any human interaction (both yes.com and RadioTagr.com are generally automated) as tweets from these social music sites do. 

You can see currently Blip.fm is leading the pack far and wide. Although twt.fm is only holding 6.01% of the market share right now, keep in mind they only launched five months ago and are a site to keep your eye on.

We'll update these charts as we collect more data and new social music sites are created. If you'd like more information or want to check out a demo of RockDex Pro e-mail me at jimmy@musicarsenal.com.