Every Band On Spotify Gets A Soundrop Listening Room by Eliot Van Buskirk.
From the post:
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.”
In topic map terminology, what I hear is:
Using the Soundrop app, Spotify listeners can create topics for any single artist or band with a single click. Associations between the artist/band and their albums, individual songs, etc., are created automatically.
What I don’t hear is the exposure of subject identifiers to allow fans to merge in information from other resources, such as fan zines, concert reports and of course, covers from the Rolling Stone.
Perhaps Soundrop will offer subject identifiers and merging as a separate, perhaps subscription feature.
Could be a win-win if the Rolling Stone, for example, were to start exposing their subject identifiers for articles, artists and bands.
Some content producers will follow others, some will invent their own subject identifiers.
The important point being that with topic maps we can merge based on their identifiers.
Not some uniform-identifier-in-the-sky-by-an-by, which stymies progress until universal agreement arrives.