Soundrop Launches Listening Rooms On Facebook
By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
Digital music wonks (like us) got all excited when Facebook added the ability to let you jump in to what someone else is listening to, in real time. Maybe that’s cooler as a concept than an actual thing, though. It’s certainly not something that I do — and I listen to music as much as I can, and check Facebook probably too much. If I’m not using Facebook real-time music listening, logic would dictate that no one is.
In spite of that — or because of it — we’re intrigued by Soundrop‘s announcement that it is putting listening rooms on Facebook artist pages. This upstart Spotify app already impressed us by building a real-time group listening platform on top of a super-arcane computing language that somehow emerged from Ericsson, which can apparently scale far beyond Turntable.fm, and then by mobilizing that for outside embedding.
This means that one listening room can exist in multiple places. This is what we expected from the future, even that future also means people can’t stop talking about people talking about a banana slicer.
“A Soundrop room embedded on Facebook is the exact same room found in the popular Soundrop app on Spotify,” reads the announcement. “Voting, chatting and playback is all synchronized in real-time. What one person writes in the Soundrop room on Facebook is what another person sees in the room on Spotify. When someone votes up a track, the playlist changes for everyone, no matter where they use Soundrop.”
Not only that, but these listening rooms, which will live on Facebook artist pages, will include artists hanging out and chatting with their fans, presumably as music plays (the app includes a chat section so that people can discuss what they’re listening to, natter on endlessly about banana slicer reviews, or do whatever else they see fit. As for the music itself, that comes from YouTube and Vevo.
Here’s the initial list of artists planning Facebook listening rooms with Soundrop, from the announcement:
- Matisyahu, who will chat live with his fans January 29th (12:30 PM EST / 5:30 PM GMT)
- Delphic, who will chat live with fans on January 31st (2 PM EST / 7 PM GMT)
- MC Lars, who will chat live with fans on February 1st (3PM EST / 8 PM GMT)
- Owl City. Adam will chat live with fans on February 4th (2PM EST / 7PM GMT)
- Dan Deacon, who will live chat with his fans on February 5th
- Devlin, who will chat live with fans on February 6th
- Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, who will give away tickets to their London album launch party at 4 PM GMT today
- Fearless Records, which will have its popular room The Mosh taken over by Motionless in White
- Franz Ferdinand
- Hot Chip
- ABBA
- Public Enemy
- Greg Dulli (The Afghan Whigs)
“We’re excited to make Soundrop available in the main place where artists connect with their fans,” said Inge Andre Sandvik, CEO, Soundrop. “Whether you want to use Vevo and YouTube or Spotify as your music service, Soundrop has you covered. We streamed more than 500 million tracks last year in Spotify, and now we’re excited to help artists accelerate their video traffic by bringing our same addictive social music service to Facebook.”
We’ve said it before, and we’ll probably say it again: If digital music 1.0 was about isolating music fans in our headphones, digital music 2.0 is about bringing us together online.
