Turntable.fm

When I was living in Prague I often felt out of the loop as far as new music and I missed hanging out and talking with my Seattle buddies about what new tunes they were listening to. As I listened to music during the day, I dreamed of being able to share that experience with my friends like we used to.   I was still listening to music for much of my waking hours, but it was now an isolated experience.  I looked to services like last.fm to help solve this, but it was only a partial solution. My friends could see what I was listening to and I could see the tracks that they were into, at least for those friends that had an account – which was not very many, but it was still isolated.

I began to dream about what my ideal solution to this problem was and it seemed that, for the time being, nothing like what I wanted was available. I contemplated building it myself. Forget the fact that I didn’t have the programming knowledge to do that, the world (read: I) needed something like this.

Fortunately, others felt the same way and people more capable than me came up with a solution even better than what I had been dreaming about. The product that they came up with is turntable.fm

What it is

Turntable.fm is a website where users gather together in virtual rooms to listen and interact over music together. Visually, the site does a great job of giving users the sense of actually being in a physical space together.

This is what a room in Turntable.fm looks like

How it works

Right now the site is still in beta.  To be able to access the site you must sign in with your Facebook account and you must have a Facebook friend that already has an account on the site. Each user has a customizable (to a point) avatar that is placed in a room with the avatars of the other people that are currently in the room. There are five DJ spots on a stage where several people take turns picking the tracks that get played in the room.  Those listening get to vote the song as lame or awesome. If a song gets too many lame votes then the song is skipped. When DJing, you can choose from over 11 million tracks available online (thanks to MediaNet) to put into your “queue” and if you can’t find the song that you are looking for you can upload your own. There is also a chat feature for the users in the room.

Why it is awesome

I am not sure if this paragraph is really necessary if you read the previous paragraph. Doesn’t it just sound awesome?! I will give you some highlights.  One of my favorite things about the site, other than the functionality, is the great community that is forming. After using the site for a bit, people started greeting me by name when I would enter a room. I love being able to interact with fellow audiophiles from all over the country (sadly it is only available in the US for now) who can help me discover new music.  This is a similar experience to the one that I used to enjoy with my friends, but on a larger scale.  The site takes it even one step further. By allowing listeners to vote on tracks it empowers not only the DJs but the audience as well. On top of that, DJs receive a point for each time that someone votes their selection as awesome. These points can be used to upgrade your avatar.

You can unlock more avatars by gaining points

They mean it when they say beta

Turntable.fm is still in beta. I feel like that word has lost a lot of its meaning lately with many companies launching ready products as beta or keeping products in beta too long (*cough* gmail), but this is truly a beta product. It does still have some bugs in it and it is clear that they are having some issues scaling.  They have a lot of people who want to use the service. In fact, it gained over 140,000 active users in its first month open to the public.  That kind of growth is understandably difficult for a new site to deal with. Particularly one that has to do as much heavy lifting as turntable.fm. So far users have been very understanding.  The idea is still so novel and exciting that we are quick to overlook a few glitches now and again, but this is something that will need to be tackled quickly before people get too frustrated or someone else comes along with something similar that is more stable (I’m looking at you Facebook)

The most common bugs that I have experienced are having songs play in the wrong order, the audio cutting out, and the page freezing. The last two issues are easily remedied by refreshing the page, but if you are a DJ when that happens you will loose you spot and it will likely be quickly taken by someone else.  

Feature requests

While the site is already great, save the above bugs, it is hard to not imagine new features that could make it even better. Here are a few things that I would love to have added to the site.

DJing

Right now if you want to DJ in a crowded room you have to wait for a spot to open up and then it is a race to click on the link.  This clicking contest can be annoying. Some rooms that I have listened in have started to organize a list of users that would like to DJ and they take turns. It would be great if turntable.fm added a DJ queue to automate this.  People could get in line rather than just having a free for all.

You have to wait for a spot to open up before you can DJ

• Similarly, I would like to have an option to -put a cap on the number of songs that a DJ can play-. After their allotted number of songs they would then automatically be put back in the audience and the next DJ in the queue would replace them.

• The audience should also be able to -vote up or down the DJ* in addition to the song.  Perhaps too many negative votes could result in the DJ losing their spot and enough positive votes could add to the DJs number of allotted songs or gain them additional points.

• The song queue is just one list right now, and I have to keep all my tracks together. This is an issue when I want to hit different rooms with different feels.  Personally, I spend time in indie/alt rock rooms, post-rock rooms and jazz rooms.  I want to be able to keep multiple playlists so that I can have a separate queue for each of these genres.

• I would also like to see the music search function improved. Providing a way to filter results by artist, album or song title would help to weed out the sometimes-cluttered results list.  Once I find a song that I like I also want to be able to click on the artist’s name or album title to see a new set of results.  

  Navigating the site

• As I said above, there are a few rooms that I frequent. Right now I can’t bookmark them on the site, but I have a bookmarks folder for them in my browser.  I want to be able to set a list of favorite roomsright on the site.

• I want to be able to see a list of people in the room.  Right now you can see a room full of avatars and if you hover over each one you can see the username, but you cannot easily, at a glance see who is in the room.

• I can easily tell you where to follow me on twitter or friend me on Facebook , but I can’t point you to a page where you can become my fan on turntable.fm. Each user should have a profile page. Others would be able to become a fan, see what songs, DJs and rooms they like as well as send them messages.

  Other features

  Other things that I would like to see include having tracks fade into each other to eliminate the lag between songs, more customization options for avatars, having room moderators be able to assign other moderators, and an easy way to get turntable off my computer and into my living room on my stereo.  Of course, I anticipate iPhone, iPad and Android apps for the service as well.

Is this even legal?

Turntable.fm, like Pandora , uses MediaNet which provides cheap licensing for streaming music. I am certainly not a copyright attorney, but there are a few issues that I fear may become problems for them down the road.  First, users are able to select specific tracks and hear them soon after. From what I understand, and I could be mistaken (it happened once before), this “on demand” style of streaming is not permitted with their current license. Second, the ability for users to upload tracks that are not in the MediaNet catalog makes me wonder how licensing is handled for those tracks.  They  do pay fees to Sound Exchange and publishers, but I am not sure how that is handled for uploaded content.  I am curious to see how this all plays out. In the end I hope that record companies and artist will see that this kind of service is great for them and will bring them a larger audience. I feel like the music industry is stuck in an old way of doing things that is broken and counter productive (e.g., suing your users) and it is good for everyone, the music industry included, to have people pushing those boundaries.

How do they make money?

As is so often the case with exciting start ups, there is the question of where revenue will come from.  Right now when a song is playing turntable.fm displays a link to buy the song in iTunes.

You can add the current song to your queue, itunes, last.fm or spotify

This will provide them will a little revenue, but I can’t imagine that it will be enough to sustain them.   They have to pay licensing and royalty fees along with the cost of building, scaling and maintaining the site.  I hope that they do fine a way to make money as I am really enjoying the service.

UPDATE: Profiles have since been added. I also just found this Chrome extension that adds some cool functionality.