As I mentioned in my previous TechCrunch Disrupt post, I met an interesting company called LetsListen that combines the clean look of Google Music Beta and the social listening aspects of Turntable.fm.
After chatting with Cole Flournoy for a while about his startup, I realized that this was an exciting testament of how the whole concept of listening is changing. In a way, it’s going back to where it started, but instead of friends and family huddling around a radio, it’s someone getting cozy next their computer while they casually DJ to their friends.
How does Lets Listen fill a void in the social listening experience?
LetsListen starts as a standard cloud music locker, almost identical to Google Music Beta or Amazon’s Cloud Player – but our bombshell is that we’ve added in the real-time social components that they don’t have. There’s other social listening apps that have the real-time aspect, but they aren’t actually cloud music lockers. We are the first that’s combined both. With us you can actually listen to your music privately if you want and use it as a replacement to iTunes – but you’ve got the option to turn on the “Public” option and then your friends are allowed to come and join you in real time, hear exactly what you are hearing and chat. The other big point with us is that our social listening experience is a lot more informal than others. It’s not a high pressure gamified environment where you are competing with other DJ’s, its all about just casually listening to music like you normally do. When you make your room public you are the sole DJ in full control. Our other big trick up our sleeve is that people in your room can share and suggest music back and forth with you (all in real time). Users can suggest songs from the DJ’s library, or their own – and if they do that, the DJ gets a message asking if he wants to allow the song to be added to the queue or not.
How do you plan on monetizing the service?
Our model is the same as Pandora – we help people discover music, and we make affiliate fees when they buy that music. Whenever you are listening to a song in the app which you didn’t upload yourself, we pay an internet radio streaming fee for that and you can essentially only hear it that one time, then if you want to listen to it again, you can buy the song. We make it really easy to buy music, and we’ve also got the “Listen History” feature that you can use to look back and see all the songs you heard with someone (and buy them if you want).
What are your goals/plans for the end of the year?
We have just made our public debuts to investor’s over the last few days at Pitch ’11, SF Music Tech and Tech Crunch Disrupt. We are raising our seed round right now. Our goals in the next 3 months are to be funded, bring our other 5 team members on sight to San Francisco (two team members are here now), and to have an average of 1000 concurrent users on the site (that’s 1000 on the app listening to music all at the same time), and also to get our first 5 major celebrities or artists to use the app. We’re already talking to one who wants to use it because its such a powerful and easy way for him to connect with his fans and drive music.
If you’re at the very least intrigued, all it’s takes is a simple Facebook login to test it out.
Thanks for the blog post!
Online listening party tonight at 5:00 pm pst. Hope to see you there
Thanks very much for the writeup — we are having a big listening party starting at 5:00PM tonight in room 3035 (enter that right at letslisten.com) come join in.