TolkunFM — a potential revolution in Turkmen musical life

TolkunFM — a potential revolution in Turkmen musical life

Written by Annasoltan on Wednesday, 17 November 2010
Media and Internet, Top Story, TurkmenistanNo CommentEditor’s note: Turkmen entrepreneurs have launched Turkmenistan’s first online social music service, TolkunFM, but this is not just a rip-off of Western-style sites, writes neweurasia’s Annasoltan. “It’s quite a cultural service the site is providing,” she writes, “[all the more so] when you think about the content of some of the music that will be on the site…”This past Monday marked the launch of VeriLoft’s new online social music service, TolkunFM (www.tolkunfm.com) — and what happened in the Turkmenet was quiet impressive to watch. Within a day, the Turkmen online community moved en masse to the site. Immediately, the site is on its way to trounce VeriLoft’s other project, the chat service teswirler.com, one of the current trinity of leading Turkmenet social sites, in terms of popularity.So, TolkunFM has the biggest online deposit of Turkmen music, of all kinds. At the moment, that means 10,000 songs and videos, all made available to Turkmens at home and abroad. It must have been quite an effort to gather, sort, upload, and test all these files! But it’s quite a cultural service the site is providing, because until now the main way to listen to the huge variety in Turkmen music has been to visit various separate websites, most notably tmrap.com, tm-music.net, and yes, YouTube, each having different functions, strengths, and weaknesses.TolkunFM also offers a lot of social functions. Typical ones, true, like following friends’ status updates on which singers/songs they favor, sharing likes, and so on, but when you think about the content of some of the music that will be on the site, it’s sure to inspire some important and lively intellectual and emotional cross-fertilization and conversations.At present, TolkunFM operates fully on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. There are some problems with Opera, and I’ll just say it bluntly: I don’t endorse using Internet Explorer for this site (then again, I don’t recommend it for neweurasia, either, because it plays weird games with our picture slideshow). There are plans to create a TolkunFM application for Google’s Android smartphone platform, too.VeriLoft is planning to work together with Turkmen singers and music artists to create separate profiles where they can independently post their own materials, primarily photos, songs, and updates. And most of all, there are plans to make the site available in English, Russian, and perhaps most critically of all, Turkish. I wish the best for the VeriLoft guys!Sourse:eurasia.com