Soundrop Rules Spotify’s Group Listening Experience, Upgrades App
By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
Turntable.fm was the “it” thing buzz whatever of 2011, and as we never tire of pointing out, we think we broke that story. It was trendy, yes, but the idea of listening to music together with other people in real time, just like grandpa used to do — that’s a keeper. Indeed, although you don’t read as many stories about Turntable.fm as you used to, plenty of people are still enjoying themselves there. Within Spotify, the group listening experience belongs to Soundrop.
On Thursday, Soundrop busted out a new version of its Spotify app, featuring a new “lobby” area for browsing recommended, trending, or all open rooms; a “drawer” where you can keep your favorite rooms; a new design for the rooms that shows you the top fans and tracks in the room; a well-thought-out chat feature that slides away when you don’t want to see it; and the ability to find your Facebook friends within Soundrop’s many rooms.
This is not a minor refresh, but an overall overhaul. If you’ve been waiting to find out what it’s like to listen along with other humans on the internet, this is as good a time as any to give it a whirl (iOS version available too). So far, it looks to be a hit.
“In conjunction with Spotify, we held an event with Kendrick Lamar [pictured above],” said Soundrop spokesman Thomas Ford via email. “We broke all our records with more than 4,200 concurrent users and approximately 100,000 visits within the 24-hour period.”
By comparison, Turntable.fm rooms max out at 250 users at a time.
According to what Soundrop told us when they visited our New York office, it is able to scale because Soundrop is built on an obscure mobile language developed by Ericsson, called Erlang, which was designed for large-scale telephony.
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