SoundTracking supports Twitter Cards so you can listen to music clips inside a tweet

Announcing support for Twitter Cards, SoundTracking enables Twitter users to view photos and play music in expanded tweets

Now you can listen to music directly from Twitter – well, at least a sample of some songs, but baby steps, right? SoundTracking has added photo and player support for Twitter Cards at the request of its users.

If you’re not familiar with the app, SoundTracking is a music discovery service that marries images and music. You can then opt to share the music and photo combination with your social network (Facebook, Twitter), or simply leave it to be discovered by the SoundTracking community. Given Twitter’s strong media integration push, SoundTrack’s Twitter Card adoption is a natural fit, and one that Twitter should love. Of course, the only downside is that we wish we could listen to the full track within the SoundTracking Twitter cards.

SoundTracking isn’t the only platform that’s taking advantage of embedding their music services into a tweet. There are some popular platforms like Ustream and YouTube, which have for a long time have been integrated into Twitter to enable users to consume media inside tweets. Rdio embedded its services in 2010, and Offical.fm recently took advantage of this “free” distribution strategy to publish embedded playlists, with the hopes of reaching a wider audience.

It’s up for debate whether Twitter integrations are beneficial to third-party developers. If a user expands a tweet to get to the content, it means they are likely staying on Twitter to consume that media instead of making it over to the proprietary platform. This was, of course, the motivation for Instagram to pull its Twitter support. The sudden move was probably also spurred by Facebook’s impending monetization scheme.

SoundTracking, which is far from reaching the scale of Instagram’s size, is undoubtedly looking for additional channels to distribute its content. SoundTracking, based on rudimentary metrics from the Google Play Store, has between 500,000 and 1 million downloads so far – that doesn’t include its iOS downloads. Evidence to expanding its reach is SoundTracking’s announcement in October about its new Spotify app, which also for now exclusively allows users to publish Instagram photos. The iOS and Android apps have yet to add Instagram support.

Ideally SoundTracking has the opportunity to flourish on Twitter during large scale events like the MTV Awards show and music festivals when music loving Twitter users are the most active. Or it could take advantage of the hashtag #musicmonday, which according to 2012 Year on Twitter, was the fifth most trending keyword in the music category on Twitter.