Company
Hangout.fm
Hangout.fm, as described on the show by Joseph Perla.
Episodes (1)
Joseph Perla, founder of Hangout.fm and creator of TurnTable.fm, explains why music licensing took four years to secure before launch.
Questions these episodes answer
Why did TurnTable.fm get shut down in 2011?
TurnTable.fm went viral without proper music licensing in place, and labels responded by cutting off international access almost immediately. That single move eliminated most of its traffic overnight, since many of its most active DJs and users were in Europe, and the platform never recovered its momentum.
From: Inside Hangout.fm: Changing How We Listen to Music Together
Why did it take four years to launch Hangout.fm?
Perla says any kind of music partnership can take years to close, and having watched TurnTable get shut down for lacking rights, he insisted on getting labels fully on board before launching Hangout. He points to TikTok spending years and tens of millions of dollars trying and failing to land a similar global music deal.
From: Inside Hangout.fm: Changing How We Listen to Music Together
How does Hangout.fm plan to make money?
Hangout runs no ads at all. Instead, Perla says the company is about to launch a virtual goods store where users buy tokens and credits to purchase fireworks, avatars and other items that appear during a listening session, following the same virtual goods model that has made billions for Fortnite and Roblox.
From: Inside Hangout.fm: Changing How We Listen to Music Together
Why does Joseph Perla call Hangout.fm a third generation social platform?
Perla says MySpace, the first generation of social media, had music built into every profile page, but the second generation, Facebook and Instagram, dropped music because licensing was too hard to solve at the time. He sees TikTok and Hangout as a third generation that puts music back at the center of how people socialize online.
From: Inside Hangout.fm: Changing How We Listen to Music Together
How did Hangout.fm reach millions of users so quickly after launch?
Because rights negotiations took years, Perla used the extra time to build native apps for iOS, Android and web all before launch, plus a deep integration with Discord. That let Hangout appear in front of billions of potential users on day one instead of growing platform by platform over time.
From: Inside Hangout.fm: Changing How We Listen to Music Together