ILXOR Listening Room - DJ my day

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.

fun while it lasted

yep. As fun as it ended up being (and it WAS fun), I just don't see myself needing to be there so badly that I feel any urge to pay for it.

it was fun but buggy and in no way was going to last very long, tho i'm surprised it took less than a month for this all to go down

how long was muxtape around in all its glory

five months maybe? but there were ways to download songs from muxtape, and that probably sped up its demise. listening room has proven to be locked down tight in that regard.

He'd have been better looking for an investor than going for $50k up-front in donations from a listening community who tuned in for something fun and free. I think the concept would have a good future with the right business model in place.

There's no way he'll get 50k from donations. Site hasn't been around long enough to amass that much of an audience or create any sort of emotional connection. I don't remember the average number of people that do donate but he'd need to get around 5 to 8 times the number of visitors to get the donation he needs. And that's considering that the 1/5 of your visitors really felt in touch with your product. I seriously doubt he had 250,000 unique visitors.

I'd be very surprised if he gets the money from donations. That's the problem with going the micropayments route. Website owners see that they're getting however many visitors and start thinking "oh if we start a micropayment system for content we can cover the running costs of the site!". But then 95% of visitors say "err no thanks bye!" and disappear.

Also 50k seems way off. I know he needs to pay license and stuff but he could just copy the grooveshark model where they settle only with the labels that get in contact with them for a 50% share of the ad revenue (
http://artists.grooveshark.com/support/masters ). No need to go the micropayments route. And even then, this is way easier to do than grooveshark or spotify for the matter where the songs are always online for you to pick. In listening room as soon as the song gets streamed it dissapears from their users' hands.

I think he's just too paranoid and off reality to pull this sort of site. He needs real internet legal advice. Seems he only has notion of how it works and its completely off.

I mean this is how it should really work. Legal in the same way that youtube or grooveshark is legal. They are not responsible for the uploaded content and have to take it down if they receive a DMCA notice. Even then they work hard to stay legal and settle with the artists or labels before any DMCA:

We strongly suggest that you contact us at licensing (at) grooveshark (dot) com before filing a DMCA infringement claim. Grooveshark has an artists/label program to ensure that any owner of content will be compensated fairly for each time their content is played via Grooveshark. To be clear, as long as your infringement claim complies with the terms of the DMCA we will honor it, however we would much rather pay you than remove your content.

I don't know, it sounds less like paranoia and more like wanting to do the right thing. Which is honourable, but most likely to end in failure.

And yeah, it's a shame but I liked it for the 'fun and free' aspect - I don't really need the service, and won't pay for it.

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.

I wonder how last.fm gets round this? I mean, presumably they are not paying $500 for every possible artist radio, user radio, neighbourhood radio, possible combination of tags radio... so there must be some other licensing models out there if you can argue your case.

Sort of feel Listening Room might have more luck if he tried to sell the model to last.fm or Spotify or someone similar but I guess you need to have a proven system and a proven fanbase in place and then sell it, otherwise they'll just go "hm, nah" and then maybe happen to implement something similar without you, maybe not.

(And you'd need to rejig it a bit to fit in with last.fm/Pandora-style licensing, which I guess only works on the guarantee that you can't fix what song will be played when, as above)

i agree with onimo and think he needs to find an investor rather than trying to put the weight of a young enterprise on the back of the audience.

I had no idea that many people were using it!!

Seems clear Abe just thought this thing up as a fun experiment and never expected to be in this situation. I fear that cobbling together a serious business plan at the last minute may not work out for him.

For all their shiny-interface Facebook-linking sins, the Mixapp guys seem to have thought things through and have a clear idea of where they want to get to (a buyout).

Spotify people: time for another collaborative playlist? I've added a few starter tracks...

http://open.spotify.com/user/miketd/playlist/1VYiyGaPHrDzTWeovieeAL

I miss Listening Room. So what're the ilxors who used to use it doing now? Using the one which needs a Facebook login? Using collaborative playlists on Spotify? None of the above?

i'm working.