Frequently Asked Questions

First of all, thanks for your interest in Listening Party. My name is Lee Martin and I have been developing and designing campaigns and products in music for the past two decades. I’ve worked at Silva Artist Management, SoundCloud, and Songkick over the years but spent the large majority of my career as a freelancer. I love working with artists, labels, and managers, helping them raise awareness to their music and build stronger relationships with their fans online. If you’re interested in my freelance work, I write about most of my client campaigns on my Medium and dev blog. Listening Party is a side project of mine and I will continue to freelance like usual.

For development updates, please follow me or Listening Party on Twitter. For major product updates, please sign up to the mailing list. I will also write up the occasional update on my LinkedIn.

Listening Party is a web platform that allows artists or podcast creators to throw listening parties for their fans. To me, a good listening party has three key components: Stream, Chat, and Links.

Stream: The album, song, or podcast being listened to, delivered in an accessible manner and synced between all participants.

Chat: A chat room where fans and artists can discuss the stream. Hosts should be distinguished in the chat.

Links: Links to whatever the host is promoting.

I wrote a blog which goes into these features in more detail.

This is the main focus of the initial offering of Listening Party. A place where you can invite your fans to stream a new piece of content, engage in conversation around it, and further direct them to goal oriented locations around the web.

Both the stream and chat of the initial offering of Listening Party have unique solutions.

In order to stream the party's audio, users will be able to choose between the streaming services designated by the party host. The streaming solutions we currently support are Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, and an artist hosted CDN audio stream. Parties may have one or all of these solutions. Both Spotify and Apple Music require users to have premium accounts in order to stream full tracks on 3rd party apps. In order to utilize SoundCloud, the audio must be configured to be playable by the SoundCloud API. Listening Party will do it's best to tell users when their streaming plan isn't sufficient or the party audio isn't available in their market. None of these solutions provide real-time synced streaming so Listening Party simply puts users on the right track at the right position given how far along time has progressed since the party began.

In order to join the chat, users will need to sign-up to an account on Listening Party. All this requires is a valid email address and once their account is created, they will be able to join any future parties with ease. At the moment, the user's avatar is powered by Gravatar. I've chosen to separate a user's account from their streaming account for many reasons. First, Apple Music does not provide a user identity for security reasons. In addition, if you chose to stream via a CDN audio stream for undistributed audio, we would again not have a user identity. Finally, I feel like users may switch from one provider to another on a whim and this solution preserves their Listening Party identity while allowing their streaming solution to be more fluid.

Yes! We've got a never ending demo party of Video Age's new album Away From The Castle. Thanks to my friends in Video Age for letting us feature their work. Be sure to check them out on Bandcamp and wherever else you stream music.

At the moment, Listening Party as a self-service platform does not have a formal launch date. You can say it is in private "beta."" To begin with, my plan is to personally help artists set up parties using the web app and through these test cases, discover any features missing from the product and what that self-service platform might look like. I feel like this approach will gel nicely with my freelance work while also offering the most insight for the product development itself. In that regard, you can say the initial offering of Listening Party will function more as an extension of my freelance work. This may all change at any moment but it’s how I would like to kick things off. So, if you really want to throw a listening party using this product, the first step is to simply reach out.

Since the initial offering of Listening Party will be an extension of my freelance work, I will be charging a fee that covers the hours required for me to set it up and the technology involved with running it. This fee should be more affordable than hiring me for a unique freelance campaign but potentially out of reach for smaller artists on a budget. Trust that I wish to bring this product to as many users as possible (read: very affordable) but I’m starting that journey by leaning on the creators who I have worked most closely with: small to medium sized artists. Since this number will fluctuate given demand, please reach out to me directly so we can discuss it. I invite any size artist to reach out because it would also be helpful to understand your budgets.

In addition to generating awareness about your release, the initial offering of Listening Party will allow you to include a series of links which direct your fans to locations of value. For example, you may want to include a link to pre-order or pre-save your record. You can also include a link to your online store. Another idea would be to simply link out to some of your social presences. In the future I’d like to bring in deeper integrations to drive further value.

At the moment, Listening Party is a standalone application that will be accessible via a personalized url (for example, listeningparty.com/artist) and does not offer the option to be embedded onto another site. The app was designed and developed to perform well on different sorts of devices, responding to laptops, desktops, mobile phones, and tablets. Lots of work has gone into utilizing the limited screen real estate in a manner which still covers all features.

There is nothing more valuable during product development than feedback. I would very much appreciate your opinions regarding everything you’ve read in this FAQ and any updates I’m providing over Twitter and LinkedIn. In addition, any insights you might have regarding the world of listening parties would be very helpful. How have you done this in the past? What do you expect from a product like this? Have I lost my mind? Let me know.