Group listening rooms are gaining popularity among tech-y office workers, like for example this room occupied by Gizmodo writers (and their groupies).
Screengrab: Wired.com

The club was dead. I’d almost forgotten I was there until someone started talking to me. But then the DJ played a new song and soon three people I knew were chatting amongst themselves, even though I’d never introduced any of them to each other.

This didn’t happen in some dingy meatspace dance club — it happened on Turntable.fm, in an online listening room created by urban omnivore service Foodspotting. One of the people I ran into was a lawyer and blogger friend, the other a former colleague, and the third was Fiona Tang, the head of outreach for Foodspotting.

The music floated from Janet Jackson (my choice) to a Toro Y Moi remix, and the conversation included lamentations on how none of us were actually getting any work done.

“I think every time we’ve used it, we’ve ran into people we know,” Tang said later in an e-mail to Wired.com. “It’s gone viral within the startup community and appealed to so many people. Our team used to just play music on our laptops, taking turns to DJ manually, going around the office one by one, but now we love that it’s automated via Turntable.fm. It’s a good way to re-energize the team during the afternoon lull.”

The recent surge in online group listening services is just the latest indication that the future of the music industry lies somewhere in the cloud. In their still-nascent forms, they all offer roughly the same service — a place for people to gather online and take turns playing music for each other — but like underground dance clubs in the real world, each offers a variation on the theme, transforming the act of music discovery into a uniquely social experience.

Turntable.fm turns your browser into a virtual dance club where users swap turns at the DJ tables and rate songs “awesome” or “lame” (Rolling.fm is almost identical). Listening Room offers a simpler UI with just a column for users to play tracks along with a chat window (MuMu Player and Outloud.fm are set up similarly to Listening Room).

Listening Room's interface feels more like playing records in a basement than hanging out in a club.
Screengrab: Wired.com

“I think it’s an idea whose time has come,” Listening Room founder Abe Fettig said in an interview with Wired.com. “I think if the concept is good then we’ll need multiple successful mutations…. It’s a matter of taste.”

So far, Turntable.fm seems to be attracting the most attention. But even that service, which showed up in June, is still in its very early stages. When contacted, Turntable.fm founder Billy Chasen said in an e-mail that he didn’t want to be interviewed until the service opened up its private beta, which he claimed would only be possible once he thought the site could handle the influx of new traffic. Still, the service is already so popular that Kanye West and Lady Gaga have reportedly chipped in for Turntable.fm’s recent $7.5 million financing round.

The concept of listening to music with friends online is so simple it’s amazing these services didn’t pop up sooner. In some ways, these small services automate what has been happening in back channels among music heads for years (e-mailing links to tracks, swapping mix CDs, etc.). Yet they do it with a savvy that’s definitely part of the post-Napster era. (That said, the creators of some of the group listening sites note that one of the main reasons such services didn’t exist previously was simply because the technology and bandwidth didn’t exist to support them.)

Outloud.fm, for example, grew out of a “for fun” project by co-creator Mike O’Brien to build an MP3 server.

‘We thought it’d be cool if there was a service that made real-time sharing of music easy and fun.’

“Mike and I worked together at Meetup, where we spent large parts of the day sharing links to YouTube music videos and we thought it’d be cool if there was a service that made the real-time sharing of music easy and fun,” Outloud.fm co-founder Steven Huynh said in an e-mail to Wired.com. (A recently added feature lets Google+ users throw YouTube-fueled listening parties.)

Whether they have the 2-D disco vibe of Turntable.fm, the That ’70s Show basement feel of Listening Room or the “is-this-Slacker?” feel of Outloud.fm, they all offer ostensibly the same experience — log on, upload music, listen, chat.

Since all the services allow users to upload almost any track they want from their hard drives (or in the cases of Turntable.fm and Outloud.fm, tracks from MediaNet and SoundCloud, respectively) there’s a seemingly endless amount of music that can show up in any given room. Users can jockey to one-up each other by playing one hot track after another — something for which Turntable.fm awards points. With the right group of people, the sites can prove addictive.

“We’ve been using [Turntable.fm] at the office a whole lot,” Chris, a 22-year-old web production artist from the Chicago area who asked that his last name be withheld, said in an e-mail to Wired.com. “The company I work for has offices in several different cities throughout the U.S., so it’s been great to connect with co-workers and hear their different tastes in music.”

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