We first wrote about US startup NoiseToys back in 2010 when it launched an iPhone social music game called HitMaker (Bulletin, 26-May-10). Two and a half years later, it’s trying something more ambitious: Playground.fm. It’s an iOS music playlists app for people to “instantly listen to a personalized selection of music from your friends, world famous DJs, and music lovers just like you”. VentureBeat expands on this: Playground.fm users can create playlists by dragging and dropping songs from their iTunes collection or Spotify Premium account, and then make those playlists available for other users to stream. The article is misleading on licensing, though, claiming that “the company avoids the royalties problem — the songs have already been paid for by individual users”. In fact, NoiseToys is paying SoundExchange whenever someone listens to a song they don’t own on the US-only app. It’s free, so ads look the likeliest revenue stream if Playground.fm takes off.
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