Turntable.fm releases Piki app, for music recommendations and streaming
Turntable.fm is one of the many social streaming music sites out there -- it allows you and your friends to stream music and even listen in together to your favorite albums and songs. The company already has its own standalone app for the App Store, but it's trying a new tactic now to grab attention in this increasingly crowded streaming market, releasing a new app called Piki (a misspelling of "picky," I guess) that's centered not just around listening to music, but also around sharing recommendations and favorites.
Just like any other streaming app out there (Pandora, Slacker and Rdio are all popular variants on this), Piki lets you pull up radio stations that will automatically fill with music and stream it out to wherever you happen to be. The difference here is that instead of coming from a computer or even a radio producer, these stations are filled with music recommended by your friends and other members of the service. You can provide reactions to the music as well, and then those picks are incorporated in other users' music, too.
I know Pandora does use user preferences to rate its various music streams, and while Slacker's big claim is that they're using actual radio producers to pick some playlists, this is definitely an interesting idea, especially if you've got friends using the app with some excellent taste in music. And the fact that Turntable.fm is branding it under a completely different name shows that things are getting hectic in the streaming business. They're doing whatever they can to nail down an audience of listeners. If you're down to put an ear on some new tunes recommended by your fellow listeners, Piki is currently available on the App Store for free.
