Interview: Parker Lieberman, Founder of Dropp.fm

By Jason Epstein

New social network Dropp.fm was created by founder Parker Lieberman in an effort to help people discover, collect, curate, and share new music. The service eliminates reliance on license services to experience and share with friends, while making it simple to collect custom record collections via third-party hosts such as YouTube and SoundCloud.

The social network features a news feed, much like Facebook, but is described by Lieberman as “Pinterest for music lovers, making organizational sense out of vast music collections amasses all over the web while introducing users to a host of new music they would never ordinarily discover.” Dropp.fm’s beta version hits today, so we exchanged emails with Parker to talk the new service’s functionality, who it’s for, and what’s next just in time for its release.

SoundCtrl: What type of person is dropp.fm tailor-made for? Who else will find that the platform aligns with their love of music and technology?

Parker Lieberman: One of the main challenges when developing dropp.fm was designing a system that would be useful for every type of music listener, not just the heavy or light listener. The final design of the site allows any type of music listener to experience great new music. The heavy user can utilize all the features that dropp.fm has to offer and the light listener can simply log on and click play.

What genres of music and/or artists are most extensively catered to, covered, or loved by users and the platform itself?

Dropp.fm bucks the tradition of classifying music by genre or artist and this really opens the system up for discovery. Dropp.fm is all about trusting the people you follow to share great music with you regardless of genre or artist.

Can you define the words “lasting musical experience” from your mission statement: “The mission of Dropp.fm is to enable lasting musical experience among our users, clients, and coworkers.”

A ‘lasting musical experience’ is one that goes past just the initial experience of listening to a great piece of new music. Its taking that initial listening experience and growing it into a conversation with the person who shared it with you and then maybe even to seeing that artist or band with that friend and having all of that be possible because a song was shared on dropp.fm.

How much does trending play into what a user has the fastest, easiest access to? Are non-trending tracks also easy to be exposed to?

Trending is a tertiary component of dropp.fm. The first part is the newsfeed which, just as in any other social network, shows you all the new music that your friends have dropped. The second component to dropp.fm is profiles, where you can view your own playlists of dropps or go and check out anybody else’s playlists. And finally, the last component is the popular page which shows users what is trending across the network, but even more so shows users who is dropping music that the whole dropp.fm community is enjoying.

What’s next for Dropp.fm?

I have big plans for dropp.fm, but right now the only thing I am focusing on is building the best user base of music fans in the world and thats enough of a challenge.

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