Today, Turntable.fm’s latest mobile venture is launching out of beta as a free iOS app to the public. Music lovers, meet Piki.fm.

Piki.fm is the asyncrhonous counterpart to Turntable.fm’s real-time social music experience. Where Turntable requires that you and your friends (or randos) all be in the same room at the same time, Piki lets you enjoy a steady stream of your friends’ music at your own leisure and under your own conditions.

First, you sign up for the service and make your first “pick.” You search through Turntable.fm’s database (under the sameDMCA license Pandora and Songza operate under) and set the tone for your own stream of music that will represent you on Piki. Your own station flavor, if you will.

Then, you can search through Facebook, Twitter, and Turntable to find friends, who you’ll then follow. If at first you don’t succeed in finding friends (Piki is brand new, after all), Piki will auto-generate some people to follow based on your first “pick”.

From there, all you have to do is sit back and start listening.

Obviously, apps like Pandora and Songza deliver the same instant gratification of effortless great streaming music, and without the added hassle of friend-finding. However, Piki totally returns the favor where social is concerned.

Most music and/or radio apps do social in a voyeuristic way. You watch what your friends are listening to, maybe on Twitter or Facebook, and that’s that. On Piki, your friends become the stations. The title of the song and artist appear on the top banner of the screen, but the main image you see if your friend, the one who picked this song, just for you to listen to later.

What’s more, the app practically begs for interaction. When you pick a song, you have the opportunity to share a few words about it, and even dedicate it to a friend, who will then “receive” the song as a pop-up notification. Users can “react” through a broad range of emotion badges, comment, and re-pick songs to share on their own feed.

Users can even send direct messages to each other, like any other social network.

Of course, this poses the problem of randomness. A flood of your friends’ music could include multiple genres, themes, etc. and it may be a bit overwhelming. Founder Billy Chasen explains that “some people like that, that’s how [he] used to listen to music on iTunes, just all at once on shuffle.”

But in order to cater to those who require a certain common thread in their listening routine, Piki offers a broad range of controls to make sure your stream includes just what you want. For example, you can choose to filter your stream down to songs “picked” by people who generally pick a certain artist or genre. You can search for these filters, or choose from pre-selected options.

You can also fiddle around with how frequently certain friends’ picks are played. Because of the limitations of the DMCA license, you can’t choose to play songs from only one person, or cherry-pick which friends you’ll hear. However, you can adjust the frequency from more, to normal, to less, tuning out those you don’t jive (haha) with and turning up the volume on your musical soul mates.

In the future, Chasen sees a subscription-based business model somewhere down the road, perhaps giving users more tools to fine-tune their Piki stream. For now, however, the team is focused on the launch and building out an accompanying Android app.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Turntable today introduced Piki, a Pandora-like, human-powered radio app combined with powerful Twitter-inspired social features. With Piki, the most impressive part is that Turntable is one of the first music startups to get social right. The company has been working on the brand-new service for a year.

“There’s still demand to listen to music that’s powered by other people, instead of an algorithm like Pandora,” Billy Chasen, co-founder and CEO of Turntable, said during a demo for TechCrunch. “But instead of having it in very real-time, in a room like Turntable, we are providing a laid-back experience with Piki,” he continued.

Unlike competitors 8tracks or Songza, it has borrowed one of the most powerful features of Pandora. You just start the app and press play without having to search, browse, or select your mood. The stream goes through songs hand-picked by your friends and offers the option to select a particular genre.

When it comes to using the social aspect, you have multiple unique features at hand. You can share tracks that you like, which is called picking or repicking them. Even though you can add a personal message, you can actually dedicate a song to a friend and it will appear in their Piki notifications and streams.

To add a track to your profile, you can search the song database, choose a track on your iOS device, or make your phone listen and identify the song. Your Piki profile consists of songs you have recently liked. It is much more accurate than Last.fm’s profiles and much more useful than Spotify’s current profiles. At the same time, it isn’t as cumbersome as building playlists on 8tracks.

Piki has a desktop version as well. “Piki is for mobile — the web version is there for people that are using it at their desks,” Chasen said. Right now, users can register for an invitation on Piki’s website. The web beta should open its doors in the coming days and the iOS app will hit the App Store in a month or two.

Chasen was very eager to tell me everything about Piki. The team seems very committed to the app, which is in some ways a move away from Turntable’s current user experience toward a more mainstream and personal music product. “This is a year in the making. It’s been hard because, over the past year, people have asked ‘what’s going on,’ but we couldn’t really talk about it until now,” Chasen said.

Chasen believes that people use multiple music services even though it’s a crowded market. “If I want to listen to a single album on repeat, I’ll use Spotify,” he said. Piki is not the service on which you’ll listen to Lady Gaga’s latest album. At the same time, it is not a passive radio-like experience like Pandora. In the middle, there is room for a music discovery application that remains very personal.

With Piki, you can hear that one song that your friend plays at every party, or you can say that a song makes you think about a particular person. That’s the reason why I’m so excited about Piki’s social features. It goes back to what made music great in the first place: it is much better to listen to music with your friends than by yourself.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The appeal of social music platform Turntable.fm has been its synchronous music listening in public dance rooms. Anyone can become the MC, playing the tunes and playlists of their choice, just as each listener can choose their own avatar, or chat with other music junkies in realtime. And now tech and startup geeks have a new feature to get excited about: Turntable quietly announced via blog post today that users can add stickers from their startup of choice to their laptops while dropping those mad ill beats.

That’s right. For those unfamiliar, when Turntable.fm users choose to DJ in a particular room, their avatar is set up at the DJ station at the front of the room behind a laptop. Previously, those laptops were vacant beyond an Apple logo. But now, simply by going to “Settings,” and clicking on “Laptop stickers,” users can now add stickers to their laptops while they play.

Users can add 20 stickers from a slew of startups, and arrange them as they please on the back of their laptops.

The stickers will also show up on listener profiles, and users can mouse over the stickers for a zoom function to take a closer look, according to Turntable’s blog post.

It looks like the feature isn’t fully live yet for public consumption, but you can check out the sticker launch party landing page here. There are only 11 startup logos to choose from at this point, but we’re hoping it’s not too long before TechCrunch’s logo shows up, as well your startup of choice.

Last month, Turntable officially inked deals with the “Big Four” record labels (Sony BMG, Universal, EMI, and Warner) to license music from their respective collections, but it’s good to see them bringing the startup funk.

There are still a few bugs in the new sticker feature, but the startup is working those out. Check out their Twitter stream for updates.

We’ll update as we learn more.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

From the outset, the biggest appeal of social music platform Turntable.fm has been its synchronous listening in public rooms where anyone can become the dee-jay. Of course, turn back the clock six months, and Turntable probably didn’t see Facebook as a competitor. However, at f8 the social network launched Turntable-inspired synchronous listening and chat and went public with some big partnerships with the likes of Spotify and Rdio. At the time, Turntable could only grin and say “thank you,” but now the startup can reply with some big guns of its own, as it announced deals with the “Big Four” record labels — Sony BMG, Universal, EMI, and Warner — at SXSW today.

Launching last summer, Turntable saw quick, early adoption among music fans and tech media, but ever since the hype has dissipated, there have been questions hanging over the social music platform, like, “can it compete?” Without the blessing of the major record labels, many speculated that startup would be toast. But, today, that concern has obviously been put to bed, as the social music platform finally inked contracts with music’s bigs — after nine-months of white-knuckle, teeth-grinding negotiating.

Greg Sandoval at CNET originally reported the rumors that Turntable.fm was nearing a deal, and today Chairman Seth Goldstein confirmed those suspicions. Less than a year old, Goldstein said that Turntable has now reached over one million users — across platforms. Originally a web-only service, Turntable launched an iPhone app in September, which has helped increase the service’s reach dramatically.

Goldstein told former TechCrunch Editor Erick Schonfeld that part of the reason negotiations with record labels were so protracted is that it took so long to work out how it would license music given the startup’s unique music listening configuration. The setup of Turntable’s listening rooms dictate a different experience for those DJing as compared to those who are just passively listening — apparently different licenses apply to both.

While the labels have plenty of clout over the young startup, it has become clear, as Erick points out, the social music platform has the potential to be a significant marketing channel for the Big Four, with both the startup and the record labels partnering up to bring big-name artists to the platform — and to live events.

More on Erick’s interview with Seth here.

We’ll be updating as we learn more.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Regardless of where you stand on the SOPA battle, you’ve got to agree: seeing what seems to be the entire Internet come together to stand against something is incredible. Each company has a different approach, but their goal is the same: make sure everyone goes to sleep knowing what SOPA is.

While I don’t want to turn today’s protests into a who-did-it-best battle (that’s not at all the point), I’ve got to highlight Turntable.fm’s approach. It’s about as simple as could be, but it just oozes with symbolism.

If the goal is to raise awareness, the most effective form of peaceful protest is the one that spreads your message without inconveniencing those you’re trying to inform. Wikipedia’s approach, as a counter-example, brings a ton of attention to the issue — but it also pisses a lot of people off. It’s a hugely powerful move, but it taints the message for the huge chunk of people who just leave angry and confused.

Now, take a look at the screenshot above. Notice the anti-SOPA/PIPA stickers on each DJ’s laptop lid? That’s Turntable’s approach.

“Wait, what? That’s it?”

Yep, that’s it.

Here’s the thing: on any other day of the year, each DJ’s laptop generally represents which OS they’re using. On a Windows machine? It’ll have a Windows flag. Mac? It’ll have an Apple. Ubuntu? It’ll show Ubuntu’s… logo… thing. It actually becomes something of a point of contention, with OS flamewars breaking out on the regular and “Of COURSE a platform-X user would play this song” stereotyping abound.

Today, everyone playing music on Turntable stands behind the same message: Stop SOPA/PIPA. It’s the very first thing you notice when you enter the room — and if you don’t already know what SOPA/PIPA are, curiosity will almost certainly make you turn to Google, where the information is quite literally front and center. There’s no inconvenience introduced, no damning of the user experience… and yet, it spreads the message just as well as anything else. Add in the headbobbing of the crowd and the inherent power of music, and it comes together into something not only powerful, but also positive. Good job, Turntable.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“I’m flattered Facebook was inspired by turntable.fm and created a listen together feature” says co-founder Billy Chasen about Facebook’s new synchronous music listening and chat feature Listen With. “I look forward to seeing how they interpret what social music means as we seem to have different core philosophies about it (such as the importance of discovering new music from strangers and not just friends).” Chasen seems to think that only listening to what your friends enjoy won’t provide discovery as adventurous as Turntable.fm’s public rooms.

When Turntable.fm first started in January 2011 (or even when it started rolling out in May), it probably didn’t see Facebook at a competitor. At the time Facebook had no official music partnerships. Turntable.fm’s approach facilitated both listening amongst friends and big public rooms of strangers exposing each other to new artists.

At f8, though, Facebook launched music partnerships with Spotify, Rdio, and other services to share their users’ listening activity with friends. Turntable.fm began looking dangerously close to the synchronous listening experience many speculated Facebook would launch, and today they were proved right. Suddenly, there’s a much easier way to listen with friends through the ubiquitous Facebook’s ever-present Chat. Listen With’s integration with on-demand music streaming services mean users can not only discover songs through friends, but go back and play them on their own.

Listen With only works with friends, though, leaving an opportunity for Turntable.fm. Your friends may have music tastes too similar to your own to help you find truly new music. That’s surely what Turntable.fm is hoping. However, I think close friends can still have relatively diverse tastes, or at least know about musicians you’ve never heard of from within your favorite genres. Additionally, Listen With offers more intimate chat rooms that trigger notifications. These make it easy to discuss new music with the person introducing it to you, thereby providing a richer experience.

Turntable.fm will still be able to trade on its gamification, where users earn points to spend on cooler avatars when people think their song choices are ‘awesome’.  It doesn’t require a complicated signup and is entirely browser-based, streamlining the onboarding process. Also, the slick graphics make it more fun as a primary experience.

Still, when it comes to sustained use in the background, those elements don’t matter much. Facebook’s Listen With lives where people and their friends already spend their time, so I don’t think Turntable.fm will be able to compete on social listening.

If discovering new music from strangers is Chasen’s philosophy, Turntable.fm will need to ramp up features to support it. That means courting celebrity DJs and charity DJ battles. Also, improving how users browse and select a public room to enter. It could ask users to categorize their rooms by genre or mood, or detect a room’s beats per minute average. That way those bored of their friends’ music and seeking something really fresh to listen to will make Turntable.fm their destination.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook today announced the “Listen With” button, which will allow users to listen to the same song simultaneously. The feature will roll out over the next few weeks, starting with Spotify, then adding other Open Graph music services.

From the chat sidebar, users can see which friends are currently listening to music. Clicking “Listen With” will open the music player and begin the song at the same point the person’s friend is now at. It also launches a new chat window so friends can comment about the songs they share. Listening to music with friends in this way will publish a News Feed story about the activity, according to Techcrunch. Facebook has never shared chat activity with a users’ friends before, but this is similar to how Google+ shares stories when users video chat with each other.

One problem with Listen With is that users will have to use the same app. If someone is using Spotify, friends can’t click to listen to the song in Rdio. According to AppData, Spotify is by far the leading Open Graph music player with 4.6 million daily active users to MOG’s 10,000 DAU and  Rdio’s 7,000 DAU. The Listen With feature is likely to only increase this disparity and make Spotify the defacto music service of Facebook.

The new feature is similar to Turntable.fm and Google+ Hangouts, which facilitate synchronous listening or viewing experiences. Turntable.fm has users choose avatars and join virtual rooms where people take turns playing DJ. The service is more about discovering music through strangers with similar tastes than sharing with friends. Google+ lets users join video chats called “Hangouts” and share YouTube videos that friends can watch at the same time.

If Listen With takes off, Facebook could add a similar option for video streaming services. We could also imagine Listen With activity becoming an option for Sponsored Stories in the future. Promoting a shared listening experience could be quite meaningful for artists.

If Facebook ever made Chat available between users and subscribers, rather than just between friends, Listen With could be an interesting way for fans and artists to interact. Turntable.fm has seen activity spike when popular artists like Diplo, Sir Mix-a-Lot and Talib Kweli joined rooms. However, since opening Chat to users with asynchronous relationships might be tricky for Facebook, celebrity partnerships could end up being Turntable.fm’s way to survive after the launch of Listen With.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Look out Turntable.fm, Facebook has just launched its own simultaneous music listening group chat room feature. New “Listen With” buttons in Chat and news feed stories allow you to select a friend as your personal DJ. When clicked, you’ll instantly launch Spotify or Rdio and start hearing whatever that friend plays in real-time. Other friends can also join your group chat listening room where you can discuss and rave over what you’re hearing, just like if you were listening together in person.

Listen With will begin rolling out today for Spotify users, Rdio will gain support in the next few days, and Facebook plans to add more music partners soon. The new feature will force Turntable.fm to concentrate on public listening rooms and celebrity DJs, as simultaneous listening with friends will now be Facebook’s domain.

The feature could boost streaming service signups, because users won’t want to miss out on shared listening experiences with their friends. Previously, I could take your recommendations and listen individually via iTunes, pirated downloads, or a different service. Now I’ll need to sign up for whatever service you’re using to join your “Listen With” room. This could potentially weaken Spotify’s winner-take-all position by getting users to sign up for multiple streaming services. Technical problems stalling Listen With support for Rdio won’t help the browser-based service catch up, though.

While companies always say they’re “excited” for new feature launches, product designer Alexandre Roche was especially enthusiastic. He said Facebook’s internal tests have had “really positive feedback. Everyone really likes it.” When asked if Facebook would roll out a similar feature for video watching through Hulu and Netflix, Roche said that would be cool, “Maybe in the future”.

The way the feature works is, whoever you allow to see your music listening activity will also see a music note icon next to your name in chat if you’re currently listening. When clicked or hovered over, the name of the song they’re playing and the “Listen With” button appears. If someone clicks your “Listen With” button, they’ll hear exactly the same notes as you at the same time. The feature will open a Chat room for the two of you and publish a news feed story to your friends that “Josh is listening to music with Alexander Roche.”

Up to 50 friends can join your listening chat room. As the DJ switches from song to song, everyone will follow along. To discontinue the shared experience, a listener can pause, switch songs, or close their music app. One of the main shortcomings of the feature for now is that you can’t substitute in a new DJ if someone in the Chat room has something they want to play for everyone else.

Roche says he’s a fan of Turntable.fm and that there’ll still be a place for it in the listening ecosystem. He thinks “Turntable.fm is more about finding a genre you like” and discovering music from strangers. I think Turntable.fm will need to differentiate itself, because a core use case has been subsumed by a much more widely adopted service. Since Listen With is purely social, Turntable.fm should  look to add more discovery features, such as tagging listening rooms by genre for easy browsing.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“I’m a nerd, and I’m here today to stand up for the rights of other nerds.” Right now, TechCrunch is in a charity Turntable.fm DJ battle vs. Maxim magazine. Help me win it for the nerds, and the kids. Go to the MaxCrunch Turntable.fm room and click the “Awesome” button while DJ TechCrunch plays to help us win. Money raised by this Tech The Halls event benefits One Laptop Per Child, and helps ensure the next generation of nerds and entrepreneurs has access to technology.

Update: Victory for nerds and laptop-needing kids alike. The battle just ended, and the final score was TechCrunch 249, Maxim 119. Thanks to everyone who helped us raise money for this great cause.

Update 2: You helped TechCrunch win the whole event, and donated enough to buy the kids their laptops! Big thanks to everyone who listened and all the publications that participated. You can still donate to One Laptop Per Child here.

Tech The Halls is trying to raise $10,000 for One Laptop Per Child and give 50 kids their own laptop, and you can donate here. Your money goes a long way, as their rugged laptops are designed to last, and they help children get engaged in their own education.

I’ll be spinning some sweet rock, dance, and hip hop songs to liven up your Friday afternoon. If there’s a song you want to hear, write in the chat of the Turntable.fm and I’ll try to play it.

Let’s do this. Go to the Turntable.fm room,  click “Awesome” whenever DJ TechCrunch spins, and lets get these kids some laptops.

[Image credit: Noozhawk]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Having launched two companies that have gone in dramatically different directions; one’s secured $7-million in funding (Turntable.fm) and another ceases to exist (Stickybits), Turntable.fm’s Billy Chasen wraps his Founder Stories conversation by lending advice to other founders and discusses the biggest challenge he’s currently facing.

Chasen tells host Chris Dixon that finding and hiring those “A+ rockstars” is his toughest task. He says on the surface it seems simple, but “it is actually incredibly difficult and it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of energy and you don’t want to make a mistake.” He compares the hiring process to dating, “you can’t be too forward, the other person if they are too forward it kind of scares you away, there is like this whole just kind of dance.”

Switching topics, Chasen says it’s key for founders to receive early feedback from consumers. His recommendation? “Try and get things out as early as possible. Figure out what your minimum viable product is and just get it out the door.” Hammering the point home he says, “whatever it takes, get that product out there.”

Make sure to watch the entire episode to hear additional insights, including traits Chasen says startups and employees share – and what founders should avoid with dealing with both.

Episode I of this interview is here and episode II is here.

Past Founder Stories episodes featuring Mayor Bloomberg, Fred Wilson, David Karp and many other leaders are here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch