Author Archives: Georg

Say hello to your new dashboard & user profile!

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Posted by Georg on August 7, 2012 – 4:12 pm
Filed under Feature, Uncategorized

Our mission here at Play.fm is to help people discover new music from all around the globe and connect them with the DJs and radio presenters they love.

With the launch of our brand new dashboard and user profiles we’ve made it easier than ever to keep track of new mixes and radioshows of your favorite artists, labels and clubs. Additionally, you can now follow your friends to see what they have uploaded or been listening to.

We have re-designed some existing features and implemented a bunch of new ones. Here’s an overview of the most important changes:

Dashboard: New Navigation

We completely revamped the existing navigation to give you quicker access to the most important Play.fm features, such as the Upload section which gives you an instant overview of the sets you uploaded. In the Pages menu you can now find all the artists, labels, clubs, festivals and radioshows you follow and discover new ones.

News Feed & Notifications: Stay on top of things

Did your favorite DJ upload a new set?
Are the recordings from last weekend’s festival online yet?
What are your friends listening to?
The news feed will never let you miss a piece of news again. In order to keep a clear picture you can easily filter your news messages.

If you’re too busy to check your newsfeed regularly, just set up your email notifications: We’ll let you know when something interesting happened.

User Profiles: Connect with your friends

We gave your user profile a fresh coat of paint: A large and crispy clear profile picture, short bio and a concise overview of your favorites, listens and uploads. There’s even more: In addition to artists, labels and similar pages you can now also follow your friends. Use the new friend finder in your dashboard to see who already uses Play.fm and get connected.

Note the difference between “Pages” and “User profiles”: While “Pages” are for artists, clubs and other brands to promote themselves, “user profiles” are private users´profiles.

Connections: Share what you’re doing

We know you love sharing, so we’ve made it even easier to let your friends know what you are listening to and what you’ve uploaded. You can now link Play.fm with your Facebook and Twitter account and automatically share what you have uploaded or what you are listening to. Your Play.fm activity will be smoothly integrated into your Facebook Timeline in form of a nice little box featuring exactly the kind of information you want to share. (We are currently waiting for a final approval from Facebook, the Timeline Integration should be up and running on Friday at the latest.)

Favorites: Create playlists easier than ever

Managing your favorite sets and radioshows is now even easier than before. We’ve created a neat little popup that lets you collect, sort and re-arrange the mixes you like the most with just a simple click on the Favorites-Button.

Sounds good for you?
Log in or sign up, give it a try and tell us how you like it!

Send us your feedback over at GetSatisfaction or via e-mail: feedback@play.fm
We are looking forward to it!

We are hiring – to build the next Play.fm

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Posted by Georg on July 4, 2012 – 5:43 pm
Filed under Jobs, Office, People, Team, Technology, Uncategorized

Would you agree that the current Play.fm could be faster, simpler and a bit more cutting edge in general? Do you have a vision and the skills to build the next Play.fm?

Cool, because this makes you a potential candidate for the Play.fm team building the new platform. We are looking for talented people who want to join us for a few months or a longer period.

We started Play.fm in 2004 because we wanted to make the music we listened to in clubs available for everyone online. At that time everything on the site had to be managed manually by our editors and the user management was based on a Bulletin Board (yeah!). We did a major leap with the relaunch of the site in 2009 enabling DJs to upload their own shows and manage their profiles – but also providing a lot of features users don´t really need. 3 years later, after learning a lot of lessons, we think it´s time for the next Play.fm.

As music and technology enthusiasts we love to listen to music online, like working in geeky teams, and are dedicated to make life easier for radio listeners and radio presenters alike. If you want to joint the team, visit the job section for current openings.

At present we are looking for:
» User Interface Designer

» Backend Developer

» Web Developer

» Interns (starting from Oct 1st, 2012)

 

Clouds at Popkomm, SmartTVs at IFA

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Posted by Georg on September 14, 2011 – 2:34 pm
Filed under Event, Fair, Internet, People, Research, Technology, Travelling

Last week I was invited to a panel at Popkomm in Berlin to discuss cloud based music business models. Shortly before I had visited the IFA in Berlin, one of the biggest trade fairs for consumer electronics, to see what´s new at TV and radio devices. I´ll take this as an opportunity to take a look at the challenges music services are facing and at the newest devices that deliver music streams.

We all love streaming services like Youtube, Spotify or Play.fm for what they offer:  immediate online access to an infinite variety of music, no matter where we are or what device we prefer to use and no need to copy files from device to device as we can collect and access our music online and on-demand.

Although this concept is as old as the web itself (or at least from 1993 when I started listening to music online), the notation “Cloud Service” helps to underline the differences in regard to pure download services like iTunes or Beatport and became one of the main topics at this year´s Popkomm, one of the largest international meeting places of the music industry.

blogpic_popkomm2

Read More »

Feature Update: Send Button & Top 10

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Posted by Georg on May 25, 2011 – 5:15 pm
Filed under Charts, Feature

Sharing DJ Sets with your friends just got easier than ever: We placed the Facebook Send Button next to the Like Button on every profile or DJ Set page on Play.fm.

Use it to directly send one or more of your friends on Facebook a message with your recommended DJ mix or profile:

Your friends get the DJ Set sent to their Inbox on Facebook.

Send a DJ Set to your friends on Facebook.

Your friends will receive the message in their message box on Facebook: Read More »

Search fast on Play.fm

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Posted by Georg on May 6, 2011 – 10:36 am
Filed under DJ-Sets, Feature, Music

The Play.fm community is growing and growing: more fans, more DJ Sets, more artists, more of everthing. Until now, you could have a coffee break or take a smoke while the Play.fm bot was searching through millions of tracks and profiles. While some might miss good old times when everything was slower, most of you will hopefully like our new super fast search.

Most prominently placed at the top center of every page the search field itself is a little but very powerful instant search already: type in 2 or 3 letters and you´ll instantly get the most popular artists, labels, festivals, radio shows, clubs or genres (as implemented in our mobile apps):

Instantly search for artists, labels, clubs, festivals, genres or radio shows.

Instantly search for artists, labels, clubs, festivals, genres or radio shows.

Read More »