Listening Room allows users to upload songs and listen to them simultaneously with their friends.
Screengrab: Wired.com

Turntable.fm is an excellent service for friends who want to party and listen to music together online, but for those who don’t want the experience to feel like a game, there is a more subdued alternative: Listening Room.

Think of it this way: If Turntable.fm is a DJ battle at a loud club, Listening Room is hanging in a basement listening to your friends’ record collections — just music and chat. No need to accumulate DJ points or become anyone’s fan.

And that’s exactly what the service’s creator, Abe Fettig, wanted.

“It’s great fun to have friends come over and bring records or bring an iPod,” Fettig said in a phone interview with Wired.com “That’s something most music fans like to do. [When I created the site] I was thinking of a way to do something like that online.”

Listening Room is clean, simple and so easy to use that it requires almost no instruction. Go to the site, register with an e-mail address, create a room, click Add Song to upload a track from your library and start jamming. Invite friends to do the same. Repeat.

Although it may seem like Listening Room is surfacing after Turntable.fm skyrocketed onto the scene in the last few weeks, that’s not entirely true. Fettig launched the site last year but had to take it down in January after he couldn’t scale Listening Room fast enough to keep up with its popularity. Listening Room came back with a private beta in March, opened to the public earlier this month and is currently getting about 125 new user registrations per day, Fettig said.

In the time between the shutdown and Listening Room’s relaunch, Fettig, who was previously a programmer at Google after the company he was working for — JotSpot — was acquired by the search giant, figured out what he needed to do to make his site work: namely, writing solid code, figuring out how to legally offer his service and creating an advertising model to support it.

‘I didn’t want to be operating under a cloud of someday this will get shut down.‘

“I wanted it to be legal,” Fettig said. “I didn’t want to be operating under a cloud of someday this will get shut down.”

As a programmer, the coding was in Fettig’s wheelhouse; the other two obstacles presented slightly different challenges.

Eventually, he figured out that he could legally offer his service by getting a statutory license and paying royalties through SoundExchange. Through the nonprofit service, a webcaster can pay a percentage of its income (for Listening Room, it’s about 10 percent to 12 percent of the site’s gross revenue). SoundExchange will pay out money collected in royalties to artists and copyright holders (Turntable.fm reportedly also uses SoundExchange).

To generate revenue, Fettig wrote an ad-serving platform for the site. Fettig said he hopes that one day the ad platform could be a place where labels could advertise new releases from bands and even allow users to click ads that launch new tracks to play in their Listening Room.

Although Fettig has ironed out a rough business model, that doesn’t mean he necessarily wants to sell out. The founder said he’d prefer to grow Listening Room organically and build it into a company he’d like to work for rather than getting a pile of venture capital or selling to a larger company.

As for the other group-listening services that have popped up lately — besides Turntable.fm, there’s also Outloud.fm, and MuMu Player, to name two — Fettig said he isn’t worried about the competition.

“I think it’s an idea whose time has come,” Fettig said. “We’ll need multiple successful mutations…. It’s a matter of taste.”