Soundrop, a Spotify app that shares a big investor with Spotify, says it alone has the ability to scale listening rooms up so that thousands of people can listen to the same song together at the same time, using a secret sauce called Erlang — a hyper-efficient coding language developed by Ericsson for use on big telecom infrastructures (updated).
Starting today, Soundrop will offer a new way to listen: individual rooms dedicated to any single artist or band, so that fans of (or newcomers to) their music can gather to listen to that bands music. The rooms are filled with tunes already, but anyone in the room can edit the playlist, add new songs (only from that artist or their collaborations), and of course talk to other listeners in the chatroom.
“The rooms are made automatically whenever someone clicks on the artist,” Soundrop head of partnerships Cortney Harding told Evolver.fm. “No one owns the rooms, though. Artists, labels and management have to come to us to get admin rights.”
This new feature essentially turns Spotify’s desktop app into a place where you can listen to just the music of an individual artist, with other fans of that same artist chatting to each other in the right sidebar
The real-time chat function is where you can talk to other listeners in the new artist rooms, if they’re there.
“For the artist rooms, people can click on an artist and head into a room with only that artist’s music,” said Harding, a former Evolver.fm contributor. “It basically keeps people within the Soundrop experience so they can discover artists in a social environment together with other fans. You can also add music to the room just like our open genre rooms, but with one caveat: The music is restricted to that artist (or a co-production).”
In order to make these official artist rooms easier to find, Soundrop has also tweaked its search function, so fans of each band know where to go.
Finally, Soundrop rolled out the ability to subscribe to its new crowdsourced genre charts with a single click, so that your Spotify always has the latest dubstep, indie, or whatever else you’re into.
Harding said would provide a social music discovery alternative to the charts in the much fussed-over Twitter #Music app. She added that Soundrop’s charts appear to span the ages within each genre, with Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” and the latest Daft Punk single (“Get Lucky”) both charting high.
