I’ve fiddled with the beta version a few times before, but I’m happy the Vienna, Austria-based startup is now ready to release its eponymous service, Play.fm, publicly so I can finally tell you about it, too. Yes, it’s another online music startup, but worth a second look if you want my opinion.
Here’s how the young company pitches the service (it’s hard to categorize in a short summary):
“PLAY.FM sets new standards for on-demand streaming radios: the beta version transforms the largest audio database of DJ sets and live recordings into an intelligent platform with various possibilities of participation.”
Ok, that didn’t really help either, so let me give it a shot. What Play.fm wants to be is a place where people can come listen to professionally produced DJ sets, live recordings and radio sessions that are uploaded primarily by the artists themselves, targeting a mainstream audience. It’s not a place for users to upload or stream individual tracks or create and share digital mixtapes, but rather acts as a central hub where people can discover, stream and buy new music mixed together or recorded live by professionals. In turn, the uploaders get a comprehensive set of audience statistics and hopefully some visibility. This also opens up some interesting opportunities for labels, agencies, bookers and event organizers.
To a degree, you could compare Play.fm to services like SoundCloud and Fairtilizer, although those are targeted more to a professional audience at the end of the line as well, and are mostly centered around individual tracks rather than DJ sets or content recordings. Play.fm is also up against the plethora of websites that host and play DJ sets (mostly limited to one genre) in an online radio station style and usually based on a paid subscription service.
Non-uniqueness notwithstanding, Play.fm does a really good job at serving their target audience with an on-demand streaming catalog of over 12,000 DJ sets and live sessions already, and does a great job in offering a satisfactory user experience to listeners. The audio player displays sound bites in wave-form (again taking a page from services like SoundCloud), which means it enables the user to set time markers in order to identify and inquire about tracks he or she may not know yet, wiki-style. That makes the service incredibly addictive, at least for people like me.
Business model, you ask? Advertising, evidently, but also music retailing. See, each track that gets identified by Play.fm (1.4 million tracks so far) can be purchased via what the startup refers to as the Meta-Shop, which essentially pulls together pricing, track quality and purchase locations from 5 different online music shops, with 20 more on the way. Play.fm picks up a commission on all sales that are generated by people who click through to the actual online stores and complete the purchasing process.
Color me impressed, but do give it a whirl yourself and let us know what you think, too.
congrats to the guys. I’ve been working with them at the very early stage and happy to see the revamped version!
Once again a triumph of hope over experience.
For the last time: the only online music company that will succeed has been created. It is called iTunes. Everyone else has no hope.
What does all this have to do with twitter?
YOUTUBE IS DOWN!
Funny… that is what all the so-called experts said to the Google boys when they were starting. “Why try, you are waiting your time when there is yahoo, excite, ask, about, AOL, MSN, etc…”
But I guess you know all and everyone should stop working on all start-ups. Thanks for your brilliant incite!!!
iTunes isn’t even in the same category as this. LMAO. ur comment really made me crack up, idiot. FAIL.
play.fm looks awesome, might be great amongst DJs and their fans.
Haha @ the iTunes comment. All of these new music startups look interesting.. Too bad that this one is such a niche market though. I like what I’ve heard about http://www.jamwee.com so far though. I have a friend that is doing beta testing with them right now and he says it’s awesome.
i have to agree – it was about time they were featured here :)
great project
This sounds like the Portland based start up http://www.mugasha.com that Scoble interviewed a while back.
Indeed, looks like it. Seems to be electronic music oriented though. Interesting.
These guys have been around for several years yet…
About five years to be exact. Model has changed a couple of times over time though, and this beta version is a completely revamped one.
Actually, http://www.Fairtilizer.com has a fair number of DJ sets / compilations… some excellent stuff. i’ll have a look at playfm now!
They at least have a model other than advertising to cover the expenses. We’ll have to see how many leads they produce.
So basically exactly what Blip.fm is doing (or should I say ‘was’ since their post earlier)?
nope. on play.fm you can listen to dj-mixes, recorded live in various clubs, in radio studios or at home. on blip.fm – as I understand it – you just choose a playlist of tracks online, not mixed together. or am I wrong?
Looks cool, but requires a Flash player, which means no streaming for me while at work. Oh well.
Great and impressive
a really cool service! immediately found there a DJ who plays great indei rock, looking forward to seeing more social features there. need to know where the dude gets his crazy music =)
Any news about Twitter?
does anyone else notice the chat bar on myspace?
perfect rip of facebook and meebo
you should check out http://www.move-radio.com. they are u.s based and have been in beta a while. they stream dj mixes and have a cool iphone app. I love their dj shows.
c0ol Tunez*
I was really excited to try this out, but the music player is embedded in a pop-up window. What were these guys thinking?
Hi Gregory,
What’s so wrong about embedding the player in a pop-up?
Thomas @ play.fm
I just registered @play.fm, it looks really great but pop-up based player also annoys me _a lot_.
I’m convinced to control my music stream with my desktop player (winamp/Audacious/whatever) and I just can’t stand that my actually played noise to be dependant on browser/window/pop-up opened.
I accept that pop-up based player with all the play.fm features embedded in it is great, but link to m3u stream for my desktop player as an alternative would be great – that’s why di.fm is pretty usable for me. Yes, I know comparing di.fm to play.fm is sick, but you know what I mean.. ;)
However, play.fm looks fantastic.
Looks an awful lot like another start-up I’ve been using called maestro.fm. They have been around for a while with the DJ concept and information about artists, lyrics, videos, etc. I will check out play and see what it’s like.
new play.fm kick ass!!! i love it. great sets from great clubs!!
This is ridiculous! You really believe that NOW you can tell people finally about a service that´s been around for years? Don´t get me wrong – it´s good that you are writing about them, but it´s a shame that you did not do it maybe 4-5 years ago (I registered my account 3 years ago and they had tons of DJ sets online already, so probably they were online for ages already then). And it proves that apparently you know in this case (and other maybe too) that you don´t know what you are writing about …
I am usually not complaining very fast. I have been reading techcrunch for a long time now, but it´s really sad that you wrote tons of bullshit twitter stories in the meantime and skipped writing about other interesting things that are going on the internet (and there clearly are interesting things going on). If you keep going on to fill the newsreaders of thousands of people that are interested in technews with this insane amount of irrelevant stories I can at least say for myself that I will get rid of techcrunch as a news source and will never look back.
yeah, so that’s why the article is telling you that the website is completely revamped with new features plus business model behind it…what’s NOT new about it? :-)
As I said it – the article tries to convey, that it´s a completely new site, by a new “startup” and that it´s totally beta, secret until now and everything.
But it´s not, as you have been around for years and you are providing your amazing service for ages already (in webtimes). Of course, the site is new, there are new functions and everything, but your old page was amazing already, too – and worth writing about.
And for a website I have been used to get news about unique and important things before they are actually red hot or an old hat I am pretty disappointed to see, that they are lagging years behind – and it´s also said, that this way many say “hey, that´s a copy of x or y or z” while it´s the original from old that´s been copied (but not covered) in between.
And therefore I still think it to be really sad to have not read about you here before, but to see all these twitter bullshit news (I like twitter, but I heavily dislike like many others the non-relevant news that are cluttering the page, the rss feed and the twitter stream).
So, that´s what I wanted to say. :-)
And keep up the good work, play.fm! :-)
Been browsing through the streaming catalog and was hoping to find a set from Laidback Luke but nothing was available. For this to be successful they would need to be more extensive with weekly updates!