Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?
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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.
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!
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!
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)
http://jacksonmohsenin.com/2012/04/14/3-day-project-turntabl...
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.
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.
Best of luck to the Turntable team. I hope Chasen comes around, the service has a lot of great potential.
- 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.
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.
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>
And if you really want to try it out you could consider make an anonymous Twitter account to sign in with.
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.
Youtube has (almost) everything.
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.
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.
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.
Anyone in the room to troll or flood (by the way, your 'flood' methodology sucks - I type fast, I shouldn't be reprimanded for it) will be put off of the room and move on to the next, at which point, a certain amount of mutes in a certain amount of time should set a flag that puts a global mute on that person for a set amount of time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A fix is to have 2 listening modes. 1. Passive like radio 2. Active with chat(capacity 150)