Turntable.fm Hits 140,000 Users in Its First Month | Hacker News Reader

Turntable.fm Hits 140,000 Users in Its First Month

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90 pointssahillavingia62 comments

I'm still pretty excited about turntable, but not because the music is so phenomenal.

Turntable is the first web service that gives me the sense of physically hanging out with friends while online.

I consider chat rooms or IM to be v1.0 of simulating real-time social interaction on the web, like sitting around a campfire and talking.

But people don't do that very often IRL - they meet at places that have something interesting going on and chat in a low-intensity way while also listening to music, watching a show, eating, etc.

Turntable gives a nice integration of passive entertainment, active participation, and social interaction that makes me feel like I'm hanging out at a club with friends. I can go see which friends are there & what they're doing, listen to a little music, or just say hi.

I think that's cool.

The music industry would be crazy to nix this. Imagine selling special tracks exclusively through turntable.fm, branding rooms for DJs and celebs, etc.

Shazam pushes $100 M. in purchases towards iTunes etc each year. Turntable could blow that away.

But the industry is going to see people uploading DRM free tunes and freak about not getting enough of a cut.

That kind of vision doesn't exist in the music industry. They shut down Muxtape. They'll shut down this.

I wonder if anyone is working on an open source implementation that people could run on private servers. If it does get shut down, it would be nice if I could run this just for myself and my friends - really, it would be no different than inviting them to a party and turning on my radio. (Though, honestly, I'd wager someone has been sued for this.)

And yet they have allowed 8track to exist.

The founders are hoping they can exist under the protections of DMCA streaming radio.

The question is whether Turntable will have to make so many compromises with the labels that the site loses its appeal. You can't skip through something like more than two songs in a row in 8tracks. You could see how those kinds of restrictions could potentially ruin the fun of Turntable.

I was pretty excited when this first came out. I listened to it all night. But, eventually I felt there was something still uncomfortable about the whole experience. Some people said it was their new Pandora. I can't say I feel the same.

I get a little frustrated when I can't find a room playing stuff I want to hear. And then I get even more frustrated when I give stuff a thumbs-down but still have to listen to it and hope the next DJ doesn't suck. I feel like I've been too spoiled by personalized music services. Personally, the chat room isn't really a valuable feature.

Seems like it's a lot more fun if you can join rooms with friends or people whose tastes you know intersect yours

Exactly. When nobody I know is on, I just use Pandora - with a crowded room, I can't skip a song I hate. And with friends, you get exposed to new music from trusted sources, and everyone ends up trying to play something that's equally palatable.

(Unless your friends are jerks and decide to play Tool's LAMC.)

So excited that you just referenced Tool's LAMC. To thumbs up this comment, press 1. WEEEEE-SKRUM.

Sure. The problem is that we would most likely use the 'upload' feature to share songs and not their existing library. I imagine that feature is going to disappear really soon.

Which is why it'd be nice if someone decided to implement an open source version of this we could run on private servers.

My enthusiasm for tt lasted about a week, then the rooms I was in got larger than my circle of friends and the quality of music dropped significantly and I haven't gone back. It's neat for but I couldn't maintain using it.

I haven't even tried the public rooms - every time I use it, it's with a small group of friends - always under 10 people, and frequently just five.

Totally with you. Cute idea but pales in comparison as a listening experience to Pandora.

However - if they can get some brand-name DJs on there with a known style (or grow some) I think the value prop changes for me. Right now it's "experience what it's like to be a cool dj!" Which is great for the dj but bad for everyone else in the likely event that the current dj is not in fact a 'cool dj'

But after a couple of hours with Pandora I'm hearing the same tracks over and over.

I find turntable.fm is way better for discover of new music.

Well, if enough people click "Lame", the song will be skipped, and hopefully the DJ would get the hint.

> Right now it's "experience what it's like to be a cool dj!"

Sad but true. "Look at me, I have a macbook with an iTunes playlist, and I clicked 'play' at a bar! I'm a real DJ, now!"

I think you're underestimating the 'curating' aspect of DJing. There's no skills involved on turntable.fm other than song selection. Picking the right song at the right time or something new that people find exciting is the biggest payoff in DJing for a lot of people.

Turntable.fm is a lot of fun. I've been using it with offsite coworkers to create a sort of shared music space.

Unfortunately, it seems like only a matter of time before it gets shut down by the RIAA or riddled with enough advertising to make it sickening.

they source their music through medianet, who presumably have deals with all the labels: http://www.mndigital.com/

They use MediaNet for now... totally legal.

It costs them around $.002 per listener of a serendipitous play, and 10 cents for the DJ (which is an on demand play)... This could get expensive pretty quickly, so I'd imagine they are negotiating/looking for another source.

Also interesting - to be DMCA compliant, they'll also have to follow other groundrules, so users:

1) May not see ahead in a playlist past the currently playing song

2) May only play or pause the list

3) Can only play 3 songs per artist per hour, maximum

4) Can only play 4 songs from a single album in three consecutive hours, maximum

5) May skip ahead only 6 times per hour.

What about the feature which lets you upload any mp3 you want and play it to the crowd? A lot of my files don't have the artist information, I don't know how they plan to pay to play the song.

I've found it will usually try to match against tracks in their database (sometimes to my chagrin)

I've never tried a completely untagged file before though... so report back when you find out?

I was speaking from experience. I uploaded a song with no information at all. Of course, it ends up saying 'untitled' but played just fine.

Edit - They may have changed this since the first time I tried it. It seems other people are getting errors.

Untagged files are not processed properly by the uploader. You'll get a "General Upload Error". This also seems to happen when there are multibyte characters in the ID3 tags.

I've had that error occur several times, and then the file finally made it through.

It was from a Russian band, tagged with presumably non-ascii characters, but it finally went through, and I really really doubt they have some of the other things I've uploaded.

What about the fact that I can upload my own music?

Turntable has got me thinking. It seems to me there would be a market for doing something similar for "real" DJs, where they could stream live sets to listeners. I know I love to listen to a good electronica DJ when I'm coding or just chilling, but I can't always take my laptop with me to a live set. Obviously it could be done with justin.tv or ustream for example, but something more customized for sound should exist. If it got popular one could even have a profit-sharing scheme with the DJs like justin.tv has (or is it ustream?), so not-super-famous DJs could earn some cash on the side.

What do you think? Would anyone ever use a service like this?

This is already sort of happening on turntable. The other night Sir Mix-A-Lot was DJing in one of the rooms.

So can a DJ on turntable actually DJ (e.g. transitions, mixes, effects etc)? If not, did Mix-A-Lot just put on cool songs in sequence or did he have a prerecorded mix or what? I mean for the regular facebook-crowd just putting on playlists for each other is cool, but what I was thinking was more focused towards people who enjoy live DJ sets. Alas, I have not been able to get into turntable.fm yet, so I have to ask :/

No transitions/mixes/effects, just picking cool songs and taking turns like everyone else. I could easily see turntable hosting solo DJ sets with transitions and everything (and charging admission). Definitely something I'd pay for.

Heh, the concept of online clubs (with real DJ, cover charge etc) intrigues me. I wonder if that is just crazy enough to work.

I've thought about this as well. I used to record my DJ sets with an mp3 player that had line-in. I'd just spin, record, and then upload when I got home the next day (and even do my podcasts this way on my home gear). An iPhone app that did the same for name brand DJ's would be excellent. They could record or even stream to a room of their own (or their label or the nightclub itself). I'd love to login to the Club Amnesia room and be able to listen to sets from their Ibiza parties in the last week. The right execution would totally work for EDM fans I think. I tried something similar with podcasts: bestdjpodcasts.com but what TT has is much more compelling IMO.

If you don't care about streaming you can use something like fIRE2 from Audiofile Engineering and upload direct to Soundcloud. There are other similar products in the app store, and you could probably even use the built in free "voice memo" app. Streaming live is hard because you generally have no control over the uplink wifi and 3G is too slow.

Interesting, thanks for that! I know lots of DJs are using SoundCloud now, so maybe a TT-Soundcloud type integration with some branding elements and the like would do the trick. How great a tool would TT be during say, Armin Van Buuren's weekly A State of Trance show to interact with his fans in realtime. I know guys use Twitter now but I feel like Twitter is being forced into being this tool because this tool doesn't really exist. This would bring some context to the conversation.

The EDM crowd is exactly the type of people I'd see targeting with this. As you suggested clubs could have their own "rooms", as well as individual DJs. Streaming live (if possible), and saving to an archive. Fans/listeners could obviously mark as favorite and get notifications when live or a new set has been uploaded from the club/DJ. Real time chat for discussion and requests. Frontpage with featured up and coming DJs, the most favorited and so forth.

As you remarked though, proper execution and probably contacts so as to get some sizeable DJs in from the start would be key for this to work.

The smaller labels or clubs is the way to get the DJs. If you let them monetize their own rooms (sell their merchandise, music, or own ads) then there's a huge incentive for them. The clubs would be interesting though. Imagine using virtual currency to buy someone a drink or some glowsticks swag for your avatar.

I don't know if this still goes on, but the guys at turntablelab.com would have live DJs in their office and a video chat (forget what service it was on) on mute. It was especially cool because most of the listeners were also DJs that bought from TTL, so you could talk shop and learn a lot while listening to sweet tunes.

Sounds a lot like Mixlr http://mixlr.com/

I just tried to request site access ... kudos to these guys ... the request process itself was hilarious! Attention to detail ... that's where it's at.

I have a facebook account, and a friend who was a member, so my process was mostly just annoying. I guess they didn't want to deal too much with tracking referrals on their own end, so relegated the process to Facebook?

What did you find annoying about it? I clicked to log in, not knowing if a friend was already a member, but I guess someone was, because a few seconds later I was in. It was very simple and quick, it didn't annoy me at all.

I find it annoying that I basically have to use Facebook to gain instant access. To be fair, I have no idea how the alternative login method works, but apparently you have to wait until they make it through to you in the queue - so if I invite a friend who doesn't have a Facebook account, I end up disappointing them.

This looks like a cool site, but I don't have a facebook account and won't create one for the purpose of logging in to another site.

Someone should write a quick bash script that'll automatically create a facebook account with random information, specifically for this type of circumstance.

Obviously it would break the TOS, but it would give you a way of checking out some Facebook-only services. And if you have anarchist-leaning feelings, you'll also be sticking it to The Man by adding noise to their signal.

I'm pretty sure you can't create a working Facebook account using a quick bash script.

The biggest problem I can see is the e-mail verification, but I imagine even that sort of thing would be scriptable. It's all just squirting characters over HTTP, right?

In theory, yes, but the problem with this kind of complex scraping is that you're constantly chasing the moving goalposts of facebook's code updates, which are frequent.