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Turntable.fm's Piki for iOS shapes streaming music around friends' tastes
Turntable.fm's live music rooms are great for inflicting our questionable choices in music on others, with one major catch: everyone has to be in a virtual room at the same time. The company's new Piki social music app for iOS won't let those friends (or soon to be ex-friends) get away so easily. Rather than rely on the professional recommendations of a radio provider like Pandora, the service automatically generates a stream of music based on the collective selections of those you follow. Piki will also auto-recommend friends based on personal selections, and everyone can message each other or tag tunes with reactions -- we'd be careful about revealing that love of polka dubstep to the world. While copyright licenses prevent Piki from offering friend-specific streams, or listening outside of the US, we won't complain too much when the service is free and will get an Android port. Our friends' ears, however, won't be so fortunate.
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.
