We once found ourselves intrigued by a unique desktop app called budtobud, which let anyone turn their computer into a listening room. Switch it on, start listening to some music, and invite your friends — just like a desktop version of Turntable.fm, except you could play whatever you wanted. Budtobud was complicated. First, who downloads…
The romanticization of the olden days-practice of making a mixtape for someone you like might be considered a “slow meme.” It never takes the internet by storm, but it’s consistently mentioned — usually in the context of apps that purports to let people make mixes for each other. Shared playlists are great, as are sites…
We think Soundrop, the group listening platform, is cool for a number of reasons: It just put listening rooms on Facebook. Its listening rooms apparently can scale like crazy due to the use of some arcane technology from Ericsson called Erlang. They can also exist concurrently in different places on the internet. Like, if you’re…
It’s going to take a while. Eventually, online listening rooms such as Turntable.fm will feel as normal as radio — another tool for letting people listen to music at the same time, even if they can’t talk to each other — does now. Just because music gets distributed digitally and over the internet doesn’t mean…
The legendary, awesome-in-every-way Neil Young recently took to the cablewaves to tease his Pono music ecosystem again — the one that will save music fans from compressed music and stupid white headphones, liberating us into a vinyl-like universe where the sound has soul, man, soul you can feel. One point he made on The Daily…
We must admit: Budtobud is not our favorite-named app. Is it supposed to be a riff on “peer to peer?” We’re not sure. Regardless, what it does is neat. First, it turned your iTunes into a free group listening party for your friends. Then, the interface improved, although it still had too many windows and…
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…
Last time Evolver.fm checked in with listening room app Budtobud, we praised its functionality, but lamented that its interface felt “overthought, with lots of windows, menus, and modes.” Partially in response, Budtobud recently rolled out a revamped, slimmed-down version of the service, but my prognosis is… better, but still a little too cluttered.
App.net is garnering lots of attention among the technorati for its innovative business model — a subscription-based, ad-free, microblogging social networking service and an open API for third-party developers. A “real-time social feed,” App.net pledges to do basically what Facebook Connect does, but without being Facebook (see “Dear Mark Zuckerberg“). Although it only reached…
While techie hipsters (techsters?) complain that Turntable.fm is so over, most people and even music fans only recently began to grasp the concept of downloading MP3s from the internet and transferring them to a portable MP3 player, in the grand scheme of things. When you obsess about technology all day, it can be easy to…
The genius of Turntable.fm is the way its design is perfectly reflective of its function. The first time you visit it, you can tell that this is a place where people gather to play music to each other. Turntable.fm isn’t as hyped as it once was — in fact, it has become nearly as popular…
The creators of the new group-listening app budtobud say they had a long conversation with Turntable.fm creator Billy Chasen at TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 (see update), when they were working on a social DJ music player. At the time, he was still working on his old company, stickybits. The following spring, Chasen launched Turntable.fm, the music-tech darling of…
Soundrop, the Spotify app that lets you join virtual rooms to listen to music along with friends and like-minded strangers, released a new version on Monday morning with several improvements designed to make it easier to find your Facebook friends on the service as well as rooms playing music you might like, plus fun new…
We’ve been digging the Soundrop Spotify app since it launched last year, allowing Spotify users to create or join listening rooms where they can listen to the same song at the same time with their friends. Yes, Turntable.fm popularized this concept, and that app remains the favorite of many, but Turntable.fm hardly has a monopoly…
On Thursday, Facebook announced its breakthrough real-time group music listening feature, which rolls out first for Spotify, with other services to follow at some point in the future. Today, Cole Flournoy, the developer of another real-time group listening app, LetsListen, claims that the cozy relationship between Facebook and Spotify is too cozy — in fact,…
