Just another day in the office playing chocolate covered rasin basketball. Dan Kantor ftw!
Please join us for a very special celebratory Groundhog Day night of music with two of our favorite Album of the Week picks, Snowmine and Spanish Prisoners.
Brooklyn local Field Mouse and Academy Award nominated artist Ben Lear will be performing, too, making this is one helluva lineup you won’t want to miss.
@Pianos 158 Ludlow St | New York, NY Doors at 8:00 pm | Thursday February 2, 2012 Tickets $8 (all proceeds to artists) | 21+ Buy tickets here and rsvp. We can’t wait to see you and cheers to the little groundhog not seeing his shadow!
Yesterday Facebook got into the “Listen With” game by announcing a new feature that allows people to click a button and listen to what their friends are listening to along with them. I haven’t tried it yet but it does look pretty nice.
Of course, as soon as they announced it, everyone cried “they are stealing from Turntable.fm”. Techcrunch even ran a followup post where Billy Chasen the founder of Turntable.fm said he was flattered Facebook was copying them.
Here’s the thing: Facebook is not copying Turntable. Not only are the features pretty different, but the idea of listening with friends is as old as, I don’t know, say, music.
As listening moved online, one of the promises of that was the idea that we could now network our stereos and listen to music with other people regardless of physical location. I’ll argue that no one has nailed it yet but clearly we are getting close. I believe the way to do it right is to study how, why and when people listen to music and then shape these tools to support that behavior. We (exfm) have some interesting ideas around how to do this, but are not ready to roll anything substantial out yet. Judging from the comments on those TC posts, it looks like there are a bunch of sites out there trying as well.
So to sum up, no Facebook is not copying Turntable.fm. Listening with friends online is a pretty old idea (see my 2004 grad school project Awaire). A bunch of sites are also doing this (see Tomahawk). And in my opinion nobody has gotten it right yet. Oh and if you really want to Listen With in exfm, ok fine, you can do that right here.
I read this post yesterday and loved it. Today we’re featuring these guys as our Site of the Day. Go read the post and then go listen to their music. You’ll love both of them.
I posted a recent Facebook comment regarding our policies with signing artists and found myself getting into a discussion of what the role of an independent label is in 2012, something I’ve often been asked about in interviews but have never really been able to elaborate on.
Basically, it…
#fuckyeah
This is great. Have enjoyed this every year hypem does it. Awesome job again this year.
