Turntable.fm’s mobile music app Piki shutting down on Sept. 23 to focus on update of parent service

Mobile music app Piki.fm is shutting down. In an email to its users, the company revealed that the last day of service is on September 23 and blames its demise on lack of resources to “continue developing and maintaining Piki”. Instead, the team will shift its focus to develop a new version of its main product, Turntable.fm that it expects to release in October.

The music app launched in April as a blend of Pandora meets social media whereby you could listen to radio-style streams curated by your friends. It differentiated itself from its sibling product by saying it’s not real-time and doesn’t try to recreate the physical act of bringing music fans into the room. As we reported, it’s a more passive experience whereby users rely on friends to suggest music to play what you might want to hear.

Of course, the service is competing against the likes of 8track, Spotify, and other music companies. And with Spotify’s move into social now available for everyone, things certainly looked bleak for Piki.fm.

Five months later, Piki.fm realizes that its experiment wasn’t a success and is now shutting down. However, for those that used the service, the company is letting you download a CSV file of all your picks or you can turn them into Spotify playlists.

Here’s the email that was sent out:

Hello,

We’re really sad to say that on September 23rd we will be shutting down Piki. We are a small team and unfortunately we don’t have the resources to continue developing and maintaining Piki. We sincerely thank you for trying Piki and we hope that you enjoyed it as much as we did.

The team has refocused on a new version of turntable.fm, coming early October. If you’re interested in getting an email when we launch, please enter your email here http://bit.ly/14o3gdJ

We’re not going to leave you empty handed. You can download the list of all of your picks as a CSV file or make it a Spotify playlist here: https://piki.fm/exportmusic

If you have any questions please contact [email protected]

Thank you,
The Piki Team

Photo credit: EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images