Rolling.fm: Yeah, We Copied Turntable.fm, But We’re Taking It to the Next Level

http://www.betabeat.com/2011/08/08/rolling-fm-yeah-we-copied-turntable-fm-but-were-taking-it-to-the-next-level/

by shakes • 15 years ago

37 37 15 years ago

gphil2• 15 years ago

Missing part of the title: "...But We’re Taking It to the Next Level"

And there's no "totally" in the original title.

This editorializing seems to imply that there's something wrong with competing with an existing business and trying to beat them at their own game, which there is not.

cosgroveb• 15 years ago

I doubt cutting the second half of the headline is editorializing. HN only allows 80 characters in submission titles and this one weighs in at about 67. The submitter may have tried the whole headline first then cut the second half of the headline. Adding the word "totally" seems unnecessary but I think you're reading too much into this.

gphil2• 15 years ago

Maybe so (apologies to the poster if you're right) but I wanted to make the point.

ryandvm• 15 years ago

I love the tasty irony of this editorializing taking place on a Reddit clone.

pseudonym• 15 years ago

Wasn't Reddit a Digg "clone" in the first place?

MartinCron3• 15 years ago

This is interesting in the context of all of the patent discussions that have been happening lately. Is Turntable.fm a patentable invention? Should it be?

I haven't used it myself and I don't have a fixed opinion on the matter. On the surface it appears to be both non-obvious and novel (no prior art).

jarek3• 15 years ago

I'm having difficulty formulating what is patentable about a website that allows users to create music playlists. What exactly is the invention?

MartinCron3• 15 years ago

It's not creating a playlist. It's creating playlists in the context of social interactions with other (representations of) people, some of whom are also creating playlists, some of whom are giving you feedback on the playlist.

If the bar is set by Amazon's "buy stuff in one click because we remember how to sell stuff to you from the last time we sold stuff to you" patent, then this is in the same ballpark.

rpeden• 15 years ago

To be fair, this isn't exactly uncommon in the history of business.

If I remember correctly, in Drucker's Innovation and Entrepreneurship, this exact phenomenon is discussed as a counterpoint to the first-mover advantage. It is often easier to let someone else do the hard work of verifying that the market for a particular class of product exists. Once you've seen what went well for them and what didn't, you can learn from their successes and mistakes and use that data to one-up them.

From the perspective of Turntable.fm, it isn't necessarily bad news either. If your product is successful enough to inspire someone to compete with you, it might just be a positive indicator of the viability of the market you are trying to serve.

kwis• 15 years ago

Being a fast-follower is often an excellent strategy.

I've long thought that somebody will make a fortune by setting up a company that clones successful America-centric startups into Europe, Asia and/or Brazil; using a fast-follower strategy to test core ideas, but then implementing them in untapped markets.

bravura• 15 years ago

The Samwer brothers in Berlin (European Founders Fund) do exactly that: http://www.economist.com/node/21525394

The have cloned AirBNB (Wimdu), for example. I seem to recall that they had several large exits by cloning sites like eBay and then selling to the company they cloned, but I can't find the article right now. In a sense, if an American company doesn't know how to penetrate a particular international market, then these clones actually do add value.

fbailey• 15 years ago

Rocket Internet in germany is doing that

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

They admit to copying some parts of it, not to totally copy it. Why are you putting words in his mouth? And copying is so overrated these days. By that I mean people forget that's how companies compete in the same space. They copy features from other and improve on them, or take the product in a different direction, and that's exactly what the founder of rolling.fm said he's doing.

If each and every company had to do something 100% original, there wouldn't be a Pepsi to Coca-Cola. They didn't copy the exact formula of Coca-Cola, but I'm sure the author of Rolling.fm didn't copy the source code of turntable.fm either. He just made it similar enough to compete in the same space, but also different enough to be compelling over turntable.fm. And that's how companies compete with each other in every industry or market. And that's how progress happens and technologies evolve.

People seem to be making such a big deal out of copying these days, because of all the patent lawsuits, which don't really allow you to do that. And that's another reason why the patent system is so broken. It doesn't take into account how business works in the real world.

jsmcgd• 15 years ago

Competition in itself is definitely not news worthy.

flog• 15 years ago

Absolutely. I don't quite understand this seemingly common held belief on HN that first-in somehow means you own an idea?

ericd2• 15 years ago

I don't know if you've experienced this, but it is one of the most irritating things in the world to see something you've put hours of thought into on every facet of the design copied almost verbatim, doubtless with very little more thought put into it.

One of the few things that keeps this kind of thing in check is the risk of being publicly shamed and the associated reputation hit. So that's why this is here.

tlack• 15 years ago

I wish either of these services would let users mix via line in or mic in so DJs could free form their tracks and mixing style. This, coupled with a 5-10 minute per room restriction on mix length, could really take the performance possibilities on these sites to the next level. Right now all you can do is use the site as a shared iTunes which is kind of disappointing for those fond of regular DJ performances.

jcapote• 15 years ago

Sad to see it making the same mistakes as turntable.fm, such as the facebook logins only thing.

idonthack2• 15 years ago

I was hoping for something that dropped the whole stupid "dancing avatar" concept. I don't want to watch cookie-cutter people bob their heads, I want a human-generated playlist that takes up as few cycles as possible.

pavel_lishin• 15 years ago

Perhaps someone will come out with a pianobar* equivalent for this.

* https://github.com/PromyLOPh/pianobar

mpobrien• 15 years ago

in that case, you might like outloud.fm. the design is barebones and utilitarian, both twitter and facebook logins are supported, and you can also play tracks from soundcloud. full disclosure: i built it.

idonthack2• 15 years ago

Looks pretty spiffy. Is there any list of public rooms somewhere? One of the things I liked about turntable was that I could pick through a wide selection and gate crash the ones that sounded interesting.

jarek3• 15 years ago

Hmm... kinda like shoutcast? :D

stephencelis• 15 years ago

Wouldn't radio streams fill that gap, then?

Turntable's design sense was its differentiator, and many of my friends were completely charmed by the avatars when they first tried the service.

If you actually do want the functionality of Turntable without the avatars, http://listeningroom.net/ came out awhile before Turntable, but never seemed to pick up.

tangothedog• 15 years ago

Somewhat off-topic, but I'd like an explanation for why startups are requiring facebook in order to sign up for a service? I'd love to try turntable.fm (as well as rolling.fm, and mixapp.com), but I'm not on facebook nor do I ever plan to be.

Is there some advantage to doing this that I'm not seeing? I understand the appeal of a limited beta and exclusivity, but I would think it would be to their advantage to offer multiple ways to sign up.

calbear814• 15 years ago

Many people don't want to give out another e-mail or another password to yet another site. Given the Gawker and other leaked account debacles, many people use the same login/authentication across web services. By using my Facebook login, I put more trust in Facebook securing my credentials vs. a startup I barely know anything about. Plus, it saves me tons of time.

Terretta• 15 years ago

What happens when FB disables your account?

thomaslangston• 15 years ago

The login problem is solved better by OpenId than by Facebook Connect.

whakojacko• 15 years ago

Yes.

1) Its some extra work for what is likely a tiny portion of their target user demographic (note: this isn't the demographic that would use a normal signup if it was an option as supposed to facebook connect, just the ones that won't use it at all if it isn't)

2) They get nice benefits of forcing people to use facebook auth, eg friend lists within the app. Turntable knows all of my friends who use the service, and can show me rooms that they are using. If there was an alternate non-facebook signon that I had used instead, this wouldn't work out

3) The signup is probably more frictionless for users, many of whom are fickle and might not sign up if it seems like a lot of work. I say probably because I don't have experience with tracking conversion rates or anything here-this is just a guess

calbear814• 15 years ago

I haven't used Rolling.fm yet but a few design elements stuck out immediately:

- The look and feel is really like Apple vs. Android with the avatars and overall aesthetic bearing resemblence to MSN Messenger. - On Rolling.fm, the avatars face left and right whereas on Turntable, you see the back of the heads emulating the feel/atmosphere of going to a live show. This little detail made a big difference to me and gave me the impression that the Turntable folks have more of a focus on the music experience.

I think the Rolling.fm site looks more like an avatar chat site with neat music features. If someone took the same concept and instead streamed videos on Netflix, that would be super interesting too since it would be like entering a "matinee" type of show and people can room chat like on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

calbear814• 15 years ago

I'm going to continue on this since the ideas are coming non-stop:

- On Turntable.fm, they should make the Avatars and volume level respond to your rating of the songs. So let's say you think a song is awesome, your Avatar should move closer to the stage vs. if you don't like a song, you should move to the back of the room + the volume should get lower until the next song.

- Another pivot could be using music as a theme for an avatar based dating site. Music + Dating has always been a great pair together (think Say Anything or High Fidelity).

gyardley• 15 years ago

Business is business, and competition's inevitable -- but that said, I can't see myself talking openly around this team in the future. Given their track record, who's to say they won't try to do the same with something of mine?

Rolling.fm: Yeah, We Copied Turntable.fm, But We’re Taking It to the Next Level

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