Scott Kleper is a co-founder of SpotDJ, who started his programming career writing Mac shareware in High School and received a Bachelor's and Master's in Computer Science from Stanford University. He has worked at Apple, WebTV, and a number of startups including Reactivity, M-Factor, Be, and Bluedog. His personal blog largely focuses on his obsession with a frozen treat called Dole Whip. Visit the company blog here.

What is SpotDJ, and how did you come up with the idea? How long did the service take to develop?

SpotDJ is a service that provides audio commentary for music. Users simply play their music like normal in iTunes and every once in a while, SpotDJ while chime in between songs with a tidbit about the song -- info about the artist, gossip and rumors, song interpretation, news, recommendations, whatever. All of these "spots" are user-generated. So if you have something to say about a song, just play it in iTunes, click a button, and start talking. Your creation gets shared with other listeners tuning into the same song.

It's pretty cool because you really get a sense that you're listening to your music alongside other people who like the same stuff. Having a voice narrating from time to time helps break up the monotony of a music only experience while providing some added context and serendipity.

I built a prototype over a couple of weekends late in 2005, though the idea has changed a lot since then. Things didn't really kick off until earlier this year, when I connected with Kevin Barenblat and Grant Goodale. We've had a closed alpha version out to testers for a few months now and just went into an open beta earlier this week.

How will you encourage people to participate and record spots? What measures have you taken to prevent abuse of the service?

One thing that we've seen with our early users is that it's really hard to just be a listener. Once you've heard a few spots, you start to realize all the little nuggets of information you have about your music, and sharing that just comes naturally. We've also made the technology really simple. You don't need to know anything about audio formats or audio editing software to do this. Just click a button, start talking, and click "upload".

There are a number of ways we'll prevent abuse. The spot that you hear when you listen to a particular song is based on a number of factors, including how other users have rated that spot. So spots that are low-quality or just some dude saying "What up?" will naturally fall to the bottom of the barrel. We also have a way for users to flag particular spots as inappropriate, which will pull them out of the pool of spots while we review them. We do have some users plugging their podcasts or blogs through SpotDJ and we're okay with that. If someone is listening to Metallica, there's a good chance they'd want to know about your Metallica blog, as long as your plug accompanies an otherwise interesting spot.

How do you plan on generating revenue? Will advertising be included in the service interface and audio spots?

Right now we're just focused on building the technology and the SpotDJ community. We plan to monetize traffic through ads on the web site and sales of music (good example: I heard one of our DJ's rave about Gram Parsons, who I had never heard of. I immediately went to iTunes and bought the song, but soon I'll be able to do that from within SpotDJ).

There are some other approaches we're still discussing that are farther off, but of course we wouldn't (and couldn't) do anything that would annoy our users or threaten the listening experience.