This wasn’t an easy decision. I’m very fond of Listening Room as a product, and working on it has been the most fun I’ve ever had writing software. But over the past few months I came to realize that the approach I was trying to take in working on LR wasn’t going to work. I was trying to do it as a side project in my free time, but without full time attention the site was suffering from unfixed bugs, downtime, and a lack of new features. And I was trying to bootstrap Listening Room with revenues from ad sales, but I’ve learned that with an ad-based business model you need to have serious traffic (and probably an ad salesperson) before you can sell many ads, which means running at a loss in the short term. And of course with the costs of music licensing and bandwidth Listening Room isn’t cheap to run.

Doing Listening Room right would require investment money and a couple of full time employees – in other words, a startup. But leading an investor-backed startup is not what I want to do with my life. The costs in terms of time, energy, and stress are more than I’d be willing to give, and the rewards, even in the case of a successful startup, are (in my humble opinion) overrated. Plus I think I’d make a terrible CEO.

So Listening Room, I’m afraid, does not have a future. I could let it limp along a while longer, but that would only be frustrating to me and LR users, and sooner or later it would be brought down permanently by a crisis that I didn’t have time to fix. I think it’s much better to have a clean, graceful exit. So this Friday it is.

One year of Listening Room. This has been an amazing experience for me, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who used and supported LR. You’ve been the best. Thank you so much. In particular I’d like to especially thank the following people (in no particular order): Joseph Wain, Josh Bryant, Ryan North, Tim Mansfield, Alasdair North (for his amazing Listening Room extension for Chrome), Michael Tildahl, Reuben Antman, Joe Kraus, Joshua Stone, @lograh, Hank Heyming, Frannie Kelley, Garrett Wilkin, Luke Stevens, Angela Watercutter, John Stoltenborg, John Dismore, Scott Schiller, David Thatcher, Seth Parker, Jim Cannella, Kevin Goldberg, John Seroff, Matthew Lee Johnston, Sky Spooner, Hannah Fettig, and everybody at The Echo Nest. Also thanks to everyone who advertised on Listening Room, and those of you who made donations – I really appreciated that.

While Listening Room will not continue, my company Sleeper Industries will. There’s a ton of interesting stuff to work on around the intersection of music and technology, and perhaps some of the ideas and code from Listening Room will resurface in other products in the future. Stay tuned, and keep in touch.

On the sponsor side, I’m happy to report that I have the first couple of sponsors lined up. There are still more advertising spots available, so if you’re interested in advertising on Listening Room please fill out the beta signup form (and check the box that you’re interested in being an advertiser), or email abe at sleeperindustries dot com.

I have good news to report on Listening Room: I don’t have to raise $50,000. It turns out that Listening Room will qualify as a “small webcaster” under the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008, which means I can opt in to an alternative agreement that has far lower up-front fees. So low, in fact, that I don’t think I’ll even need to do a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money. So that’s one big obstacle taken care of. Yay!

The problem of having to raise money hasn’t entirely gone away, though. Listening Room is still going to cost quite a bit of money to run, plus I need to pay myself to keep working on it. In my last blog post I outlined my idea to have a system where a room could run on contributions from participants (the community radio model), or have a sponsor with ads (the commercial radio model). I still think that’s a good idea, but it’s a little complex, and I don’t want to hold up the LR relaunch. So I’m going to start with something simpler: In-page advertising.

Now, I’m on the record as not being a fan of ads. They can be intrusive, they eat up too much real estate, and much of the time users filter them out, either mentally or with tools like AdBlock. But there is one ad network that I like: The Deck. The Deck runs ads on a hand-curated list of web-design-related sites. The ads are small, relevant, and interesting. Most importantly, sites that run Deck ads only show a single ad per page. The result is refreshingly clean – if you’re not familiar with Deck ads, see Daring Fireball for an example.

Unfortunately, Listening Room isn’t a design site, so unless The Deck wants to launch a new music-related ad network in the next couple weeks (hint hint Coudal partners!), I can’t use their ads. So what I’m going to do instead is imitate their ad format: a single 120×90 image, with up to 80 characters of text. Everyone in the room will see the same ad at the same time, and a new ad will rotate in for every new song. In a true sense the advertiser will be sponsoring the song, covering the costs for everyone in the room to hear it. I’m going to personally review ads to make sure they aren’t obnoxious, and are relevant to the LR audience.

So here’s the plan for getting LR back up and running:

1. I’m currently making some technical changes to make LR comply with internet radio regulations. These changes should be done in the next couple of days.
2. I’m looking for advertisers to sponsor Listening Room. Please contact abe at sleeperindustries dot com, or fill out the form below.
3. Next week I’m going to relaunch Listening Room in private beta, to test out all the new changes (there are some nice new features and UI improvements as well). You can sign up to participate in the private beta below.
4. After a short private beta period, once I’ve got the bugs worked out and enough advertisers in place, I’ll re-open LR to the world.

Thanks again to everyone for your support. I can’t wait to have LR back up and running!

Here’s the beta signup form (if you can’t see it below, go here:

Listening Room is not a tool for pirating music. It’s designed to be able to share music with other people without sharing files with them – they get a chance to hear stuff they don’t own, and then if they like it they can buy their own copy. So I don’t think it’s any kind of threat to the music industry, and I haven’t had anyone in the music industry contact me to complain, much less make legal threats.

That said, the fact is that Listening Room involves streaming music over the Internet, and according to US copyright laws you need additional permission from the copyright holder to do that. There are ways to try to avoid this issue, including operating under the DMCA safe harbor provision and pretending/hoping there’s no copyrighted material on your service until a copyright holder notifies you of a violation. But I believe the right thing to do here is to respect the spirit of the law, and figure out a way to pay the copyright owners for the right to “perform” (as they say in the copyright laws) their works by streaming them online.

My company, Sleeper Industries, is a one-man operation, and I certainly don’t have the legal and financial resources to negotiate agreements with all the record labels. Fortunately, there’s another option: Listening Room can operate under existing agreements for Internet radio broadcasting. This is called ’statutory licensing’, because it’s determined by law – the same rules apply to everyone. I keep track of all the songs getting streamed, and pay the standard rates to licensing agencies. Copyright holders get paid, and Listening Room can operate without any fear of getting shut down. Yay!

There are a couple of catches, though. First, the law defines certain requirements that services must meet to qualify for statutory licensing, and Listening Room will have to be modified slightly to meet these requirements. There are limitations on how many times you can play songs from the same artist or album within a short time period (this is called the “performance complement” – do a Google search if you’d like the details). I don’t think this will be a problem for the vast majority of rooms, which thrive on variety. But if you were planning to use Listening Room to play an entire album for a friend, I’m afraid it won’t be possible. (One side note here: If you’re an independent artist or label using LR to broadcast music for which you own the copyright, you won’t be bound by these restrictions). A second, and potentially more problematic issue for Listening Room, is that you’re not allowed to publish a schedule of exactly when a song or artist is going to be played. Honoring this will require changing the Listening Room queue UI a bit. I have a couple of ideas about how to do this without compromising the flavor of Listening Room. (As to why this is a requirement, I can only assume it has to do with people using analog recording devices to record a song off the air, which these days seems kind of silly).

Paying these licensing fees will also make Listening Room more expensive to run, and makes it all the more necessary for me to make it bring in money. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and come up with a solution that I think will work: the jukebox model (many thanks to John Dismore for suggesting this). It will work like this: Before music can play in a room, the room will need song credits. Song credits come from users, who buy them and then contribute them to the room, or from sponsors, who can pay for a room’s song credits in exchange for the room running a small ad. A song credit covers the costs of playing the song for everyone in the room. So, for example, if you have 10 people in a room and everybody kicks in one credit, you can all listen to 10 songs. I’m still working on the exact figures, but each song credit will only cost a few cents. It’s super inexpensive, and I think the fact that people are paying for the entire room to hear a song is a good fit for the social vibe of Listening Room.

So now we’ve got licensing in place, and a business model that makes Listening Room financially viable in the long haul. Things are looking up! But there’s actually one more hurdle, and it’s a big one.

There’s a quirk to internet radio licensing: you have to prepay $500 in streaming fees for each “channel” your service provides, up to the first 100 channels. Of course, in Listening Room there will be more than 100 rooms created the first day I have it back online. Which means my first monthly licensing bill is going to be a whopping 50 grand. On the plus side, that $50,000 applies toward the total yearly bill, so it’s really just prepaying fees that would have been due anyway. But having to pay that much up front, before I have any money coming in, is a problem.

So this is where I turn to you, the Listening Room community. I’m going to have a fundraiser, starting next week, to raise $50,000 to pay the initial licensing costs for Listening Room. I’m not asking for straight-up donations – instead, I’m going to ask people to prepay for blocks of song credits. You’ll basically be buying a big roll of quarters (except they’ll be a lot less than a quarter each) that you’ll be able to use to power your Listening Room jukebox. And I’ll have some discounts and special gifts to throw in too.

$50,000 is a lot of money to raise. But I’m feeling optimistic about it. I’ve been completely amazed at the passion, creativity, and enthusiasm of the Listening Room community so far. I think I’d be underestimating you all if I said it was impossible. Let’s see what happens.

More details to follow. I’m hoping to host this on Kickstarter, but haven’t gotten it all worked out yet.

Thanks for your support, everyone.

First, the level of enthusiasm about the idea has been amazing. THANK YOU to everybody who’s tried Listening Room and expressed your love for it. It’s incredibly motivating to have real people using and enjoying my work.

Having real users has also exposed some bugs and design flaws. Originally my idea was that the server would just route bits between clients, and all the ID3 parsing, playback of different music file types, and seeking to the proper position in a song would happen in the client. But it turns out I was underestimating the difficulty of doing that reliably across browsers. So I’ve been gradually moving more functionality to the server, and last night I pushed an update that introduces transparent server-side transcoding with ffmpeg. Everything streams as MP3 now. Besides being well supported between HTML5 and Flash, MP3 has the advantage of being playable mid-stream. So now if you join a room while a song is in progress, your browser can start downloading from the current position in the song, instead of having to download the whole song and then seek to the current position. All of this has made playback a lot more reliable.

I’ve been iterating on the UI, too. Here’s Listening Room at the end of November:

And here it is on December 10. There’s the new design with sidebar, and instead of a big toolbar there’s just a mute button next to the page title. If you look closely, you can also see that the record has a groove in it which shows how long the track is:

Jump forward to December 20 and it’s getting a little closer to my original vision. There’s a record player, with an arm that tracks the current position in the song. Songs that have cover art are rendered as picture disks. The record is actually spinning while it’s playing:

It’s been a good month. Thanks again to everybody who’s spent time trying out Listening Room and putting up with the bugs. If you haven’t tried it recently, I encourage you invite some friends and listen to some music together. And stay in touch, I really appreciate the feedback.

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