Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

http://www.inc.com/magazine/201205/burt-helm/turntable-founders-sxsw-where-did-our-love-go.html

by aaronbrethorst • 14 years ago

118 83 14 years ago

companyhen• 14 years ago

I started using http://plug.dj the past few weeks and I'm liking it much more than turntable. For one, it's international and you can stream/watch YouTube videos and play SoundCloud in the room. There's also an option to import your Turntable playlist.

sbarre• 14 years ago

Huh.. This is a great idea.. Bring in music that is already available out there..

dannytatom2• 14 years ago

I had never heard of this, I like it quite a bit more than Turntable so far.

guynamedloren2• 14 years ago

Brilliant. One of those ideas that seems so obvious. As crazy as it sounds, I'm hard pressed to believe that there is a better music source than Youtube. Spotify, pandora, and soundcloud are shit in comparison. Youtube has EVERYTHING - I can get any song I want (popular or not) whenever I want it, for free.

The reason I love turntable is that there's constantly new music, and it's curated for me. I mostly absorb, but I can contribute when I want to. The barrier is that I don't have much good music on my hard drive and turntable's catalog often doesn't have what I'm looking for.

The reason I love youtube is that the music collection is nearly unlimited, but I often find myself listening to songs on repeat because I'm too busy/lazy to curate a list of my own.

Plug.dj merges the best of both. And it looks nice too. I'm excited.

growt• 14 years ago

Unless you live in germany, then youtube has nothing :(

rdl2• 14 years ago

When/why did youtube become such a good music service, vs. the other services? A lot of people seem to be saying this.

VinyLion2• 14 years ago

So true. Youtube is, IMO, the biggest source of music. To use youtube for your playlist is so easy, you can find every song in seconds, AND even have the official/fanmade video for it.

Soundcloud enables you to use the music of small, unknown Artist that often rock hard, or mashup artist and eclusive previews you don't find on youtube.

And if you want to show off your own stuff, just upload it on soundcloud and add it to your playlist.

So i guess by not having to upload it yourself, but using what you just found on youtube or soundcloud plug.dj is even better for discovering new music, + its easier to handle.

I'm diggin it.

timmaah• 14 years ago

Best line of the article:

It strikes me how bizarre this is. To a SXSW audience, Turntable is already past its prime, even though during last year's conference, the product didn't yet exist.

At least they understand the issue that Turntable was too much work if you want to participate and tricky to find a room for listening.

fumar• 14 years ago

"Too much work," is correct. I used turntable for about a month. It was fun. Then it became tedious.

After reading this article, I logged on. It has changed. I suppose the users are less diverse now. It is hard to quantify. When it first started the rooms were very diverse. Today(or right now), it looks like dubstep is the main genre of music.

The music snobs have left.

draggnar• 14 years ago

I remember at first there were these Japanese rooms with awesome J-Pop. It was amazing, there was such an amazing energy around turntable - then users outside the US were blocked because of licensing.

jayzee• 14 years ago

I got annoyed when I got into a disagreement with a moderator and was kicked out of a room repeatedly.

I am not sure how many others had a similar experience but I just left the site after that. It made the site feel unwelcoming.

driverdan• 14 years ago

I have similar observations. Turntable started out very democratic. People would happily take turns playing music. Now it has IRC style drama and politics. Ops kick people out for disagreeing with them, kick people off stage for songs they don't like and generally abuse their position.

nestlequ1k2• 14 years ago

I had the exact same experience. Moderators would boot/ban you if you downvote songs, or if you criticize anything ever. I havent touched turntable in months.

Simple solution. Moderators should be able to mute users. But not kick them from the channel. What's the point of kicking if we're just here to listen to music?

If they fix this, I think I'd go back.

dandelany6• 14 years ago

TT developer here. Any user can "mute" any other user - just go to Settings > Ignored Users and add their username to your ignored list. Hope to see you back on the site soon!

mnicole2• 14 years ago

This. I recently sent a screenshot to them after 2-3 people were booted for disagreeing with the way a mod was handling the room. I'd been visiting that room on and off for nearly a year, and had never seen this person before.

They sent me a really nice response (thanks Jessica), but ultimately their inability to control what becomes an ego-based platform is going to kill them faster than the complete lack of redesigning their product since launch.

I'd even initially thought about applying for a designer role when they first launched, and had done a mock-up of the landing page that did a better job of promoting rooms and users, but they don't seem interested in hiring remotely.

Glad to find plug.dj, but I'm not finding the type of room I want and being at work, I don't have time to dink around the interface and figure it out. My main complaint with services like these is the cartoon trend. I'd much prefer a text-only view, especially at work.

dandelany6• 14 years ago

TT developer here. Sorry you had a bad experience. This is a difficult problem for us - each room is it's own community with it's own rules, and it's really hard to determine how much "policing" is appropriate on a global level. Personally, I'm of the opinion that we should intervene as little as possible. There are some cases in which people are obviously being malicious towards other rooms, eg. invading Christian rooms to play death metal, etc., and we do our best to respond and ban those involved. However, in cases of disagreements within communities, I prefer to let communities sort out their issues themselves - especially since it's so easy to create a new room/community, if you have others who agree with you. In fact, some of our best rooms have come from exactly this type of community splintering. We try to encourage small communities of like-minded people, rather than huge rooms in which everyone must play by rules that not everyone agrees with. As a user, I much prefer this to sites run by a "benevolent dictator" who has final say over what is and is not appropriate.

That said, there's an excellent chance we aren't doing it exactly right. We're constantly refining the ways we moderate the community, and we love getting input on the best ways to approach it. Feel free to contact info@turntable.fm or me personally at dan@turntable.fm if you have any more specific feedback or questions.

richardlblair• 14 years ago

I'm Canadian. When they had to cut out international traffic they lost me, and all my friends. I loved this service, so much, but unfortunately using a proxy was just too much work for a little music.

Best of luck to the Turntable team. I hope Chasen comes around, the service has a lot of great potential.

beilabs• 14 years ago

I was a fan over here in Australia and the day they blocked the international users was the day they lost me forever! Now I'm hooked on http://di.fm - Notch had a live code and I think that's what turned me onto it.

stevensacks5• 14 years ago

http://plug.dj is available everywhere, including Canada and Australia. Check us out.

haydenevans• 14 years ago

I was annoyed at the sheer length of time it took to receive a formal invitation. They built up hype way too early. By the time it was available I didn't really care anymore, I had moved on to other things out of frustration. How are you supposed to successfully launch a site in which you interact with friends but not let anyone in (at a decent rate)?

Ogre• 14 years ago

I think the last time I looked at it, it required an invite. I didn't care enough to give them an email address. Or maybe it was the same as now: the front page has "login in with Facebook" and "log in with Twitter" as the only actions. I don't want to do either of those things. Just play me some music, then if I like it we'll talk about logins. Pandora got that right years ago.

agent86• 14 years ago

I went to check out Turntable.fm, but it turns out I can't use it - I don't have a Facebook or Twitter account, so I can't login.

I understand I'm probably in the minority - or perhaps better stated, not their target audience - but you can add me to the list of folks not using the site. <shrug>

wickedchicken• 14 years ago

Not sure if this has changed, but for a while you couldn't login if you blocked the Facebook cookie (I.E., running disconnect.me and logging in only via Twitter). Very annoying to debug.

frewsxcv• 14 years ago

I use both Twitter and Facebook (unfortunately), but I would rather not have to link my account with either of these services just to log into your website

VinyLion2• 14 years ago

Did the same with tt, and it started posting stuff on my facebook account. I changed to plug, where i also had to use facebook to sign up. But it never posted anything on itself or did anything, just by clicking the share button in the room i could post it on facebook. So it's safe to use i guess.

DatMarra• 14 years ago

I can't use it either; sadly they are only open to the US. But I checked out the site Steven linked (plug.dj), it's open internationally. They use YouTube and Soundcloud for music/videos so you can play almost every song you want. For now you need Facebook, Twitter or Google+ to sign up but I heard a email sign up function is in the making.

And if you really want to try it out you could consider make an anonymous Twitter account to sign in with.

sad_panda• 14 years ago

Too much effing dubstep. When a kid comes in and starts spinning that garbage, the fans fly away.

kin2• 14 years ago

actually from my experience it was pretty easy to avoid dubstep. yes, the more popular rooms were the edm rooms but there were definitely alternates not to mention private rooms between you and your friends.

Sivart13• 14 years ago

This might not just be a problem with Turntable.fm.

CrazedGeek• 14 years ago

Eh, I still use it. For me, it's incredibly fun to get 5-10 friends in a (private) room and share the DJ spots. (I've never really bothered with the public rooms and thus have not heard a barrage of dubstep.)

kin2• 14 years ago

Does anyone think it would benefit turntable to also present itself as an app inside Spotify?

ericflo• 14 years ago

I found this article to be very well-written. It's not the most intellectual topic, but I do feel like I've gotten a pretty good window into the lives of the founders.

tomblomfield• 14 years ago

+1 great article

dandelany6• 14 years ago

I, too, found the article to be well-written, at least from a technical perspective. However, as a TT employee who knows the founders personally, I didn't find it to be a particularly accurate view of their lives or personalities. I suppose this is the danger of "well-written" articles.

ahsanhilal• 14 years ago

The real question is, how their new product Kiwi going to stand for itself against other spotify apps. I know a number of music startups, and a lot of them are making apps gunning for deeper social integration on spotify, which seems what Kiwi might be.

Also, I also hope that listmaking is a passive activity, where turntable just makes playlists for me, of what my friends are listening to. Make the decisions for me so I can focus on other things, like not DJing online.

suking2• 14 years ago

Who didn't see this coming... Hype... funding... doa.

thethimble• 14 years ago

I was a big turntable user last summer. I was pretty disappointed by their interface (fixed width, terrible search, etc.). So disappointed that I built my own clone with a friend.

I recently revisited the site - almost nothing has changed. There is so much potential to add more features and polish the interface. I think this might have something to do with their user decline. They had the initial hype wave but failed to sustain+engage their users with enhancements and features.

If I was on the turntable team I would be pushing hard to add features weekly!

reustle• 14 years ago

Are you behind www.Plug.dj

stevensacks5• 14 years ago

No, but I am. I'm Steven Sacks, the CEO and founder of http://plug.dj.

plug.dj is not just music, it's videos, too. Everything comes from YouTube and SoundCloud so licensing is already taken care of.

We love our users. Building a community is everything we are about. We listen and we care. We are involved.

plug.dj is international, and not just in name. We have localized the site into 8 languages so far and our chat translates over 50 languages in real-time so you can talk about music, videos, and anything else without language barriers. You can connect, discover and share with people from around the world.

We have dancing avatars. Every avatar has a unique dance move. We have strobe lights. We don't have room caps. We support the amazing up and coming artists, djs and producers who use YouTube and SoundCloud to share their music with the world. We accelerate the process by which they gain fans, we expose them to a wider audience, and we let them to engage with their fans from around the world in a way no other site does.

A little about me. I was a DJ for 16 years, and unlike Turntable, plug.dj is lead by somebody who loves music, and my team eats and breathes music. We regularly go to shows, concerts, clubs, festivals, raves. We hang out at record stores. I still have my vinyl collection and Technics 1200s.

If you haven't seen our site, yet, check it out. Join our party and say hello.

Cheers!

physcab• 14 years ago

I was a big turntable user too and still am to some extent. I think the site still has huge potential if they can continue to update it, however their lack of updates over the past year leaves me worried.

They still have issues with: Loading times, graphics rendering, max population limit to rooms, difficulty to "level up" and get more DJ points, stupid room rules

Things that give me hope: Cool iphone app, easy sharing, STILL discovering new music off of it, pretty awesome guest DJ's (I'm a house/mashup nut and they had DJ Aoki and 3LAU)

jacksonmohsenin• 14 years ago

I agree with the fixed width thing. I whipped up a responsive turntable concept and sent it over to them, but heard nothing. Check it out here:

http://jacksonmohsenin.com/2012/04/14/3-day-project-turntabl...

stevensacks5• 14 years ago

We saw it Jackson. Had you sent something like that to us about our site, you would have definitely heard back from us. From everything we've heard, that's a fundamental difference between us and them. We care about our users, our community and the people who give of their own time to help make our site better out of sheer love.

kendall_• 14 years ago

If you're looking for a site that has a great interface I'd try http://www.plug.dj/. They update the site very often and have a bunch of cool features that you probably won't find anywhere else. Playlists, song and video imports from SoundCloud and Youtube, unique avatars, room customization options, etc. It's also available internationally and provides real-time chat translation so you can interact with users from different countries without there being a huge language barrier.

gkop• 14 years ago

I love Turntable. You can upload your own music if it's missing from their library. And they have an iPhone app that is nearly feature-paired with the web version. Plus they were the first app to make possible live sharing DJ queues on the web (right?). Thanks Turntable folks!

peterwwillis• 14 years ago

Articles like this make me glad I don't have a startup so I don't have to go to SXSW.

A lot of these 'ideas' seem cute or quirky at first but then I wonder what kind of people would need to see someone else's mouse cursor or want to get messages from strangers, or leave sad lonely notes at random places to people they'll never meet.

Also, a reflection: "I had convinced myself that start-ups are a young person's game, that I should get away from the Silicon Valley echo chamber"

Why should young people spend their time in an echo chamber? If the wisdom of our elders is that Silicon Valley is a bunch of yes-men, why the hell should we go there? .... Oh, that's right. Money.

rdl2• 14 years ago

I guarantee you that if you do an enterprise technology (or even a "hard tech" startup of any kind, or infrastructure, or most kinds of b2b), your investors will not ask you to go to SXSW.

misterjangles• 14 years ago

I liked turntable but it I felt like it required you to be a bit active to get the full benifit, whereas I think I'm usually a bit more passive in my music listening.

ScottWhigham• 14 years ago

I learned that about myself as well. I was very active initially but, after a while, my playlist would start to repeat and then I'd get kicked from DJ'ing once it repeated twice. That meant I'd have to load my playlist, day after day, with new songs. It was work and I just lost interest.

BrianLey• 14 years ago

There is a behavioral disconnect on the site:

A fix is to have 2 listening modes. 1. Passive like radio 2. Active with chat(capacity 150)

holyjaw• 14 years ago

That's a solution to a problem, yes, but only to a tertiary problem. By splitting it to listeners and cave spinners, you'd find most people are oly listeners. The level of engagement would plummet.

stevengg• 14 years ago

I joined the site pretty early when it was filled with mostly music snobs like me. every room filled to the brim with people playing mostly less heard tracks as it got bigger and more and more new users joined a lot of the snobs left making it less fun for me.

sturmeh• 14 years ago

You blocked Australia, so you tell me. :\

stevensacks5• 14 years ago

http://plug.dj is available in Australia. In fact, our backend developer lived in Brisbane until recently.

jamesmoore• 14 years ago

www.plug.dj works down under.

nickpresta• 14 years ago

I ended up switching to Pandora + Grooveshark + Soundcloud. I can get all my music, mixes, and discovery through these three services.

redthrowaway• 14 years ago

Yes, except now you're stuck with Grooveshark's hideous "stop what you're doing and watch this ad or I'm taking my ball and going home" nonsense. I gave Spotify a go, but I'm not a big fan of having to download a native client for what can clearly be done online.

agilbert• 14 years ago

A lot of people are talking about getting active to get all the benefits. So I created a C++ app that bring turntable chat "alwaysOnTop" https://github.com/alaingilbert/ttchat Pretty usefull ! Let me know what you guys think about it.

_rknLA• 14 years ago

I was pretty addicted to Turntable for a solid 3 weeks last summer. Maybe 4.

Like others have mentioned, I do think one of the reasons they're flattening out is due to lack of updates, but I stopped logging in for two reasons.

One: It was _too_ engaging. I enjoyed every minute I was on it, but my productivity started to slip. Drastically. Suddenly it's 5am and I'm having a great chat and listen with some blokes from the UK. Dashing good time, but not the best way to spend a Wednesday night.

Two: It was too hard to find (or create/maintain) a room that played the kind of music I wanted to listen to. This speaks to their lack of updates more than anything else, as they could have fixed this pretty easily: index rooms on songs played and allow users to find rooms that recently played a specific song. Or three.

antr• 14 years ago

I 100% agree on your second point. When I created a room, with a specific music genre name on it, I would get other user coming in, playing different music and down voting/skipping my music. That was very frustrating, and that is why I stopped using it. I'd rather listen to friends' Spotify playlist

sherwin• 14 years ago

First, this was a very well-written article -- if you only skimmed the first page, go back and read the rest! I think it describes an interesting founder (well, chairman-founder) dynamic.

Second, was anyone else slightly reminded of Steve Jobs in his earlier days? Maybe it's because I just read the Steve Jobs biography, but Chasen seems to demonstrate a lot of the same characteristics: desire for complete control over the product, strong vision, disregard for more practical matters (marketability, cost), belief that the product qualifies as art, and mild tendency to be reclusive, stubborn, or uncommunicative.

jcc80• 14 years ago

Interesting that the "marketing guy" wanted him to lead off his SXSW talk by discussing how turntable's traffic was down. That just seems crazy to me and Chasen rightly ignored this advice and deemed it a "defensive" way to start of his talk.

majani• 14 years ago

Isn't turntable.fm a video game? Most video games have a fad cycle. Game developers realise this and cash in on their hits immediately. The 'gain users first and patiently monetise' strategy has no place in the world of gaming.

suking2• 14 years ago

I've never used turntable, thought it was dumb, but did it ever make $? Did they ever even have a plan to make $? Seemed like a giant fad to me and can't believe they raised $ successfully - especially with having to deal with music licensing.

rglover• 14 years ago

I had a falling out with Turntable.fm for the following reasons:

- Too distracting. I used it most when I was working to have music on in the background, but if I wanted to participate I was constantly tending to my playlist. Not sure how to fix something like this.

- No way to explore music outside of going into rooms. It would have been great if they had a "Top 200" tracks or a way to browse genres (just add in an option when you create a room to select a genre and have other for the fringe categories).

- Saving music sucked. Yes, I could save stuff to other services, but the experience of doing so was daunting. For example, I love Last.FM, but taking me to the song page of the track that's playing on Last.FM is pretty weak. Why not stronger API integration? I heard a lot of music that I would have loved to put into a list, but the functionality wasn't there.

- Becoming a DJ in any room with a decent crowd was damn near impossible. People would hover over their mouse to get that coveted slot. If I started my own room, you'd only get a handful of people to come in. The point here I guess is that it would have been nice to have some better promotional tools so people could discover different stuff. Sorry, but I don't want to listen to dubstep all day. Woh woh woh wee woh.

Easy fix: fix your features and add in some cool stuff. Send me an email or two telling me to check out something useful (not "we added in Facebook!"). I'd come back in a heartbeat if some of the stuff above was fixed.

namidark• 14 years ago

That and their TOS just throws you under the bus

nthitz• 14 years ago

What about their TOS is bad?

dandelany6• 14 years ago

TT.FM developer here. What in particular do you find onerous about the updated TOS? We collect very little in the way of personally identifiable information and don't share it with anyone except on an opt-in basis (for contests, events etc.). I happen to think our TOS is a lot better than most sites', which state that they'll share your information with anyone they want without your permission.

tseabrooks• 14 years ago

I love the idea of Turntable.. I used it off and on... But it has usability problems that haven't seemed to improve.

1) It originally only allowed facebook login, or rather thats the only thing I could find. Now there is Twitter, which is better... but it's still unreasonably restrictive here.

2) The music search is a nasty broken mess. It reminds me of searching for music in the very very early days of Napster... No, wait... Napster was better. I can't search for albums very well, I can't sort the results, I can't distinguish between a good quality song an a shitty quality song often. Especially noticeable when search a song name and getting a live track instead of studio track.

3) Something as simple as "Shuffle" never showed up. I hated having to manually shuffle my list of music. Usually I'd add entire albums at once... but I didn't want to listen to all the songs in order.

4) Starting a room is frustrating because you can't listen to music by yourself. There is no way to grow a new room from me, by myself, to 100 if I can't listen. I'll simply leave the room.

5) Needs a DJ recommendation service or something. I need a way to not baby sit my list.

All of that aside, I think their service would work well as a spotify app maybe. There are other similar spotify apps now that are much nicer to use.

twinturbo• 14 years ago

Simple, you are expendable. Give your user's a reason to say. Give them a product they're willing to pay for and can't live without.

goo2• 14 years ago

Screw them for publishing stuff to my facebook feed, and not allowing me to listen otherwise. It's terrible, but I still but up for it for some unknown reason. I have no sympathy.

dandelany6• 14 years ago

Publishing to your Facebook feed can be turned off by going to the lobby page > Settings > Contact Settings. This has been the case from the first day we published FB feed stuff, and we tried to inform users about it with a yellow banner at the top of the lobby page.

goo2• 14 years ago

Thank you, this should be opt-in, not opt out.

Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

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