"We realized early on that Turntable's best feature was also a problem: everybody has to be in a room at exactly the same time," says Billy Chasen, Turntable CEO. As time went on Chasen envisioned a complimentary service that let you listen to your friends' music picks even when they're not online. Today he's launching Piki, a Pandora-like free radio service for the iPhone and web backed by your friends tastes instead of algorithms. After all, he built Turntable to quench his thirst for human-curated music and playlists, yet a lot of the people he liked the most didn't have time to DJ a Turntable room. It isn't every night, after all, that Knife Party DJs a Turntable room of 1500 listeners. "We haven't made algorithms that are good enough to replace people," he says. "They're close, but we're just not there yet. No matter how good AI gets, it's never going to be a brain."
The fact is, there's still no great way to follow someone's music tastes online and listen to their favorite tracks, licensed directly from labels. SoundCloud relies on user uploads, while Spotify forces users to create playlists, and Last.fm doesn't have anywhere near a complete library of tracks. Rdio perhaps comes closest, which lets you play a "Heavy Rotation" station of friends' tastes, but it doesn't feel curated enough. Piki is Chasen's sincerest effort at filling this gap in the web. If you imagine Twitter not for tweets but for songs, you'll arrive at something like Piki. In essence, Piki is an internet radio service that cues up people, not tracks, one after the other.
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