ILXOR Listening Room - DJ my day

but it's working again now

there's an ILXOR and an ilxor room -- more going on in the all caps

now's a good time to add stuff to the queue. enjoy it while it's up.

get in here y'all!

mornin', welcome to the seventh hour of our barclay james harvest marathon.

umm .. which room, the ILXOR is showing as empty today ?

yeah, its empty for me too. or just not working?

ILXOR is going on right now.

sometimes it does that, keep trying, there are peeps in here

refreshed like a million times and still nothing.

in caps?

just from the link on thread

when that's happened to me I've given up and come back maybe 5/10 mins later and it seems to work, this locking out malarkey is def a new thing

in chrome, all i had to do was use the 'reload' option and the problem was solved.

well it did work. seems to have gone pop again.
poor abe.
must be seriously overwhelmed with the demand.

Which is the reload option? I'm seeing no-one and nothing.

there is no "reload option" just refresh the page

chrome : right mouse click on page > reload

suspect its just a standard refresh - but i think you can be specific on the webpage area (i.e. for pages with frames)

forks wanted some metal but others might not like it so the mordys metal club thread have started http://listeningroom.fettig.net/room/ILXMETALCLUB/ all welcome to join and play some good metal/rawk

it seems to be working now everyone

The ILXOR room is working nicely at the moment.

Kicking off again...

I'm in playing if anyone would care to join

blargh, down again.

owait it's up

We're having a sad party.

;_;

has the errors finally got in the nerves of us all? All rooms are empty.

I've been trying to use it but it seems to be down - can't add any tracks.

It's locking me out too, maybe Abe is tinkering.

seems like the cracks are beginning to show :

I had to take LR down for maintenance for the next couple of days. So many users that it wasn't working well for anyone. Back on Friday!

what will I do until then!?

back to itunes i guess
watch this space

...nothing's happening

okay stop watching this space for awhile

There's always mixapp for the non-facebook-averse.

Hopefully when it's back it will have ironed the bugs out, I wasn't able to get it to work in firefox most of the time. Chrome was ok.

I've had an idea which any keen programmer can have gratis. Mp3roulette, being able randomly listen to what another person is listening too.

Given how ChatRoulette ended up, it'll be the sound of a thousand perverts beating off.

i'm trying mixapp here:

http://mixapp.com/#r=5095rrYPVb

i like how you can use youtube

Yeah Mixapp's certainly a viable stand-in.

anyone up? just started mixapping some namlook ambient.

That's too bad, the spinning records were super cute and there was good music in there!

http://listeningroom.fettig.net/turntable.png

fully support this image turning into a common easily recognisable icon.

Mixapp would otherwise be fine, but you can't login without having a Facebook account and giving it access to your personal info, and I don't really want to do that. When it gives you the chance to register without FB being involved, then I might join.

Yeah you need to trust that they won't do anything evil with your Facebook data. I completely understand people not being willing to do that. It does work well though.

For those of you who haven't seen the room, the little record player spins and uses the artwork from your mp3, like a little picture disc spinning. The rooms have a cozy vibe about them, not so with the more generic mixapp.

xp
Your Face Will Soon Be In Facebook Ads

This is an issue with every app though - I distrust Mattel 5000 times more than Mixapp but I still play Facebook Scrabble sometimes.

those new seandalai dolls the kids are fighting over do seem kinda unsettling

http://fettig.net/weblog/2011/01/29/the-future-of-listening-room/

The future of Listening Room

I took Listening Room temporarily offline on Tuesday in the face of traffic that was growing faster than my ability to scale, and resulting in a bad experience for everyone. My plan was to make some improvements and bring it back up today. But once I had some time to think about it, I realized that my first priority really needed to be resolving the licensing and copyright issues around Listening Room.

Listening Room is not a tool for pirating music. It’s designed to be able to share music with other people without sharing files with them – they get a chance to hear stuff they don’t own, and then if they like it they can buy their own copy. So I don’t think it’s any kind of threat to the music industry, and I haven’t had anyone in the music industry contact me to complain, much less make legal threats.

That said, the fact is that Listening Room involves streaming music over the Internet, and according to US copyright laws you need additional permission from the copyright holder to do that. There are ways to try to avoid this issue, including operating under the DMCA safe harbor provision and pretending/hoping there’s no copyrighted material on your service until a copyright holder notifies you of a violation. But I believe the right thing to do here is to respect the spirit of the law, and figure out a way to pay the copyright owners for the right to “perform” (as they say in the copyright laws) their works by streaming them online.

My company, Sleeper Industries, is a one-man operation, and I certainly don’t have the legal and financial resources to negotiate agreements with all the record labels. Fortunately, there’s another option: Listening Room can operate under existing agreements for Internet radio broadcasting. This is called ’statutory licensing’, because it’s determined by law – the same rules apply to everyone. I keep track of all the songs getting streamed, and pay the standard rates to licensing agencies. Copyright holders get paid, and Listening Room can operate without any fear of getting shut down. Yay!

There are a couple of catches, though. First, the law defines certain requirements that services must meet to qualify for statutory licensing, and Listening Room will have to be modified slightly to meet these requirements. There are limitations on how many times you can play songs from the same artist or album within a short time period (this is called the “performance complement” – do a Google search if you’d like the details). I don’t think this will be a problem for the vast majority of rooms, which thrive on variety. But if you were planning to use Listening Room to play an entire album for a friend, I’m afraid it won’t be possible. (One side note here: If you’re an independent artist or label using LR to broadcast music for which you own the copyright, you won’t be bound by these restrictions). A second, and potentially more problematic issue for Listening Room, is that you’re not allowed to publish a schedule of exactly when a song or artist is going to be played. Honoring this will require changing the Listening Room queue UI a bit. I have a couple of ideas about how to do this without compromising the flavor of Listening Room. (As to why this is a requirement, I can only assume it has to do with people using analog recording devices to record a song off the air, which these days seems kind of silly).

Paying these licensing fees will also make Listening Room more expensive to run, and makes it all the more necessary for me to make it bring in money. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and come up with a solution that I think will work: the jukebox model (many thanks to John Dismore for suggesting this). It will work like this: Before music can play in a room, the room will need song credits. Song credits come from users, who buy them and then contribute them to the room, or from sponsors, who can pay for a room’s song credits in exchange for the room running a small ad. A song credit covers the costs of playing the song for everyone in the room. So, for example, if you have 10 people in a room and everybody kicks in one credit, you can all listen to 10 songs. I’m still working on the exact figures, but each song credit will only cost a few cents. It’s super inexpensive, and I think the fact that people are paying for the entire room to hear a song is a good fit for the social vibe of Listening Room.

So now we’ve got licensing in place, and a business model that makes Listening Room financially viable in the long haul. Things are looking up! But there’s actually one more hurdle, and it’s a big one.

There’s a quirk to internet radio licensing: you have to prepay $500 in streaming fees for each “channel” your service provides, up to the first 100 channels. Of course, in Listening Room there will be more than 100 rooms created the first day I have it back online. Which means my first monthly licensing bill is going to be a whopping 50 grand. On the plus side, that $50,000 applies toward the total yearly bill, so it’s really just prepaying fees that would have been due anyway. But having to pay that much up front, before I have any money coming in, is a problem.

So this is where I turn to you, the Listening Room community. I’m going to have a fundraiser, starting next week, to raise $50,000 to pay the initial licensing costs for Listening Room. I’m not asking for straight-up donations – instead, I’m going to ask people to prepay for blocks of song credits. You’ll basically be buying a big roll of quarters (except they’ll be a lot less than a quarter each) that you’ll be able to use to power your Listening Room jukebox. And I’ll have some discounts and special gifts to throw in too.

$50,000 is a lot of money to raise. But I’m feeling optimistic about it. I’ve been completely amazed at the passion, creativity, and enthusiasm of the Listening Room community so far. I think I’d be underestimating you all if I said it was impossible. Let’s see what happens.

More details to follow. I’m hoping to host this on Kickstarter, but haven’t gotten it all worked out yet.

Thanks for your support, everyone.

Posted on Saturday, January 29th, 2011 at 1:32 am.