Spinit.fm Alpha Newsletter #1 - Hello everyone!
Our first newsletter into the future of social music playing services.
First,

Wanted to thank each and every one of you that have been so helpful spreading the good word of spinit.fm. I think everyone is EXTREMELY excited about the possibility of having a new social music experience site, and let me tell you I mean it when I say "I AM TOO!".

I am going to warn you that this first email will be a bit lengthy. tl;dr (too long, didn't read) - we're really excited to kick this off - have you all - we don't like the current existing services that are out there, and we're taking the next steps very seriously. We want to your feed back (look for the link below). Please :)

For those who remember Turntable, for us it was our most memorable experience in regards to social music playing and sharing. We are creating our fundamentals around that experience that we had, taking the best parts of it that we loved the most. Everything from reliability to even down the avatars will bring us all back to the service we once loved so much. We will, however, have a ton of vast improvements on the experience and definitely set a new bar with a ton of new really great features not seen yet in this kind of service.

First and foremost, reliability.

I think every widely used social music sharing site clearly should have reliability as their #1. Currently "other" services have been completely dropping the ball as to their reliability and then blaming its users when it comes down to "it's a free service, stop complaining". If you ever see someone say this, run away from the service and save yourself the headache.

What "other" services like these need to understand is that had it not been from it's users which got them to the point to where they are now (with a user base, that is) they wouldn't have a service. It is their responsibility to get reliability down as their #1 at all times. No excuses. No "we have a small dev team" or, "We are working as hard as we can!". They bit off more than they could chew, on multiple avenues.

Which is fine, right? You learn as you go on, and as you grow. Except in this specific instance it's not changing. So, enough is enough.

As such, we have had enough. It's beyond ridiculous, we use "other" services during the day and rely on it to have good music when we're all busy working / studying. Since we're developers sitting back and looking at the complete hysteria that is "other" services right now, we've decided to invest our efforts into our own experience. Instead keeping it to ourselves internally here at our office - we want it to be public for everyone.

Enter Spinit.fm.

First, I know everyone has heard this once or twice before. The service opens up by saying how great it's going to be, and then it ends up praying to the high heavens that it can meet that promise later on. We're going to just give you a bullet list of things, and let you decide if it sounds great. Of course, we'll be creating a wonderful UI and UX experience to go along with it, but we believe on results and letting people decide if it sounds cool or not.
Playlists - using services like YouTube and Soundcloud. There will, however, be no music uploading. I figured I'd lay that right out in the open. I personally spoke with Billy Chasen (Original Turntable founder) and it is an absolute legal nightmare dealing with song royalties. Unless we come across and / or hire someone who has expertise in that field, the answer to that is "not going to happen".
There will be two "experiences". There will be a room experience and a chat room experience. If you opt to have avatars you can engage in that, if not, the experience of adding / sharing / playing / liking / not liking tunes will look more of a chat room. For those of us who use the service at our workplace - it's a bit embarrassing sometimes for coworkers to walk over and see a bunch of silly dancing avatars.
There will be points, there will be multiple characters if you choose to go that route, there will be a ton of new ways of engaging into interacting with everyone that isn't "silly" like leveling up for new avatars for example. We want to share and play music with friends, we want to have fun doing it, but we want the service to look nice and not as if it was created for 14 year olds.
Mobile - yes. Yes yes, and yes. One of the biggest things we miss with social music experiences and we will be offering it for iPhone, Android and windows phone.
Developers will have an API. And - it's an API that is fully documented, updated frequently, and guess what -- changelogs!
All updates will be done during the AM hours EST. No excuses. We don't update any of our products we have for our current clients during the middle of a work day, and as such will NOT be doing that with Spinit.fm. That's not how you update web services.
Stupid fast, efficient, with extremely high reliability. Some services complain about being "DDoS'd" (for those who don't know what that is - it's a distributed denial-of-service, essentially a huge increase of fake traffic to shut the service down with force). What these services clearly never learned about in IT 101 was how to correctly detect, manage, and furthermore work around these kinds of attacks. It gets me frustrated to see people having to deal with dev teams of these kinds of services literally just making it up as they go along with no clear, correct ways of managing and dealing with these kinds of situations. Very frustrating to see from a development standpoint, and even a business management perspective. Loyal fans deserve a rock solid service that's going to be quick and efficient. Period.
We will be building this service around developers. Because, being that we are we web development company originally, we understand that developers utilizing our service, integrating it with either browser plugins or other cool things like "room bots" is probably the best thing you could possibly try to promote and flourish. We won't be updating things without telling anyone, we won't leave the developers in the dark, and we won't make you feel like you need to "hack" things into the service. It's an open forum for the service. Audience wins.
Gee that sounded like a lot of smack talk!

It did, didn't it? Oh well. It's time for change folks, we have signed up for legal rights of spinit.fm, and we're serious. Time to move forward and create a hell of a great service. We're ready, are you?

So what's next?

We want to hear back from all of you. We want to hear your current complaints of other services, what you like and what you don't like. What you think would be cool, what you might miss from older services. And then we want to add those into SpinIt.fm.

Everyone on this mailing list will be given alpha access to the service. I'm extremely excited to say we have 609 subscribers as of this moment. I promise not to spam you with a ton of mailings, but it might be a bi-weekly newsletter. If you wish to opt out of all of this just click the "unsubscribe" button at the bottom of this email at any time.

Send us your submissions here : https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ozE2uCynKdvJNYeuXjzbpeg2egCL3OdygBBQuaJLhtc/viewform?usp=send_form

Don't be shy about sending multiple responses if you'd like.

Next newsletter - what’s coming?

We want to be as transparent as possible throughout this whole thing. As such, I'm going to give everyone a play by play as to what is happening, going to happen, and what is be expected from us.

Our backend to the service is already underway - including a fully functioning prototype we're building the rest of the service off of. We've been using this prototype every time "other" services go down, and will becontinuing development of it. This also includes the front end UI and obviously UX. Can't wait until we start sending out pictures of the interface, and hopefully get access to you folks very soon!

In the mean time, hang in there! We're not going to pussy foot it with ridiculous lies of why things take time, however we do have a prototype and we are actively developing it as I speak. No ETAs other than - if you want a great music sharing service - stay on the newsletter list and share the good word that big things are coming. :)

Make sure to follow us on Twitter at @spinitfm and on Facebook - www.facebook.com/spinit.fm for anything that may happen in between newsletter / alpha member invites.

All the best,
Brian
Founder
Spinit.fm