Who Will Win the Social Music Platform War?

Monika Jansen Aug 15, 2011 Tweet

First daily deal sites start sprouting like mushrooms.  Then daily deal site aggregrators.  Then location-based marketplaces.  Now it looks like it’s social music’s turn.

There are currently 3 social music platforms out there:

Turntable.fm was first out of the gates – we covered them back in June. You can create or join listening rooms to play music for each other, chat, and vote on what each other spins.  Basically, you are a DJ, complete with requests from your audience, who can also vote on your song choices.  All users have an avatar that appears in the chat room.

At the beginning of July, we covered Console.fm, which was developed in an impressive 2 days.   You access it via Twitter, but differences from Turntable.fm go beyond that, as you listen to music based on genre.  It pulls popular tracks from a set list, so you cannot access your own music like you can with Turntable.fm.

And now we have Rolling.fm, which everyone and their grandmother has pointed out looks and acts just like Turntable.fm.  The subtle differences include the ability to see who is in a room in one big list (also represented by avatars), and a private chat feature that lets you speak directly to Facebook friends even if they’re in a different room.

In all honesty, I have no idea which startup will win the market.  I think it’s pretty lame – as do many other bloggers – that Rolling.fm copied Turntable.fm, but I do like their additional features.  Small things like private chat actually end up making a big difference on the user-friendly scale.

Though I am not so much interested in who will win this latest saturate-the-marketplace battle, I am curious as to how many other social music platforms will pop up this year.  Any guesses?