What Killed Turntable.fm? | Hacker News Reader

What Killed Turntable.fm?

nirandfar.com

46 pointsrrhoover44 comments

This comes across like the many articles talking about what "killed" Second Life. The only thing that's "dead" about it is the unsustainable initial burst of hype; products like this tend to settle into a particular niche and stick with it. I use both regularly, and both remain active in terms of concurrent users. Just because it's no longer the media darling doesn't mean it's flat-out dead.

Investors think differently than you.

What relevance does that have?

Quite a bit for a company that choses to fund itself by soliciting investment.

Just because a company has lost its media hype doesn't mean it's "dead" yet.

    > Investors think differently than you.

How does this bridge the gap from Fact A to Conclusion B?

If investors are unhappy with Turntable's decline it won't matter if the original hype was inflated or not.

If investors have a controlling stake (or a significant minority stake) and aren't getting the results they want, they will shut down the service sooner or later so even this hyperbole of Turntable's "death" will become real "death" in the future at this rate.

Investors...you mean 'the smartest people in the room' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80%... disagree with his opinion?

There is some merit to the complaint. Turntable is far from dead, but it's also suffered a downturn in usage (as opposed to merely slowing growth). I've been on there for a long time and the top-20 rooms don't have half the population now as they did during the service's peak.

So it isn't just a matter of media coverage or failing to live up to overinflated expectations, the service has visibly lost userbase. It's also not even close to dead, though.

Exactly. There's a massive growth in users at the beginning; eventually, those that are less interested drift away, leaving a core userbase behind. In Turntable's case, the top rooms still have 100-200 concurrent users at any given time; meanwhile, the team running it has been ramping up in their regularly-scheduled events with artists and venues.

well except for the part where they lost 95 percent of their users, yeah.

It's a bit like the "one hit wonder" phenomenon. People think "Oh Hanson? They haven't done shit since Mmmm Bop. They're dead". But they're not. They're working musicians who play gigs all the time, and release albums, and have fans. They're just not in the charts all the time.

Suzanne Vega (one of my favourite "one hit wonders" of all time) wrote an excellent article[1] on this which, I think, has a great perspective that applies just as well to those of us faced with the "charts" and "hits" of the startup community.

[1] http://measureformeasure.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/surviv...

Not every musician will continuously print platinum records. Similarly, not every startup needs to be a multi-billion dollar company. Some entrepreneurs are perfectly happy building a "lifestyle" business.

You're right. Turntable isn't dead and I'll admit to using the word, "killed", somewhat superfluously but there's no denying it's decline and failure to retain a majority of its users.

I'm in Turntable.fm almost every day. So is my cofounder and so is my girlfriend. Maybe there's not a strong viral loop going on, but my habit is formed. Anytime I want to listen to music but have no idea what, I go to turntable to "Indie while you work" and most of the time, it's great.

Killed is a bit sensational & news to me. As a user of turntable I don't care about MAUs as long as the tunes keep playing.

Same with me (I frequent IWYW as well!). I think Turntable has turned into a more niche product for people like us. I enjoy interacting with my music, and actually like the fact that I have to spend extra "brain cycles" on it.

It might not be the runaway success that it once was, but I would definitely not say Turntable is "dead."

Same for me. Since it's not available in my country, I'm on plug.dj, but it's definitely a part of my daily work ritual and I would really miss it if it weren't there anymore. It's a fantastic resource to discover new tracks in a particular genre.

I think the product is only a minimalized version away from further growth. Interaction if you want it, passive if you don't. As you said, this article proves nothing. And I'd consider myself one of the passive types.

While that might true and the product is not dead, what about how long the product lasts for? If the company doesn't sell, they raised millions of dollars on the promise that they would be big. One of the co-founders already went to djz.com during the decline of Turntable. It's sort of like Posterous, people like me used the product, but it lost to tumblr and Twitter wasn't going to keep it going after acquiring the team.

Turntable launched with mainstream attraction and has since settled toward a niche audience. I have a friend that uses Turntable on a daily basis like yourself, but he is not the mainstream.

As I mentioned in another HN reply, not all products need to reach millions of users but as others have pointed out, venture-backed startups like Turntable have an obligation to deliver returns to its investors.

From the article: And that was Turntable’s fatal flaw ... the additional effort involved in using the service.

HAHA. Um, no. I use it while biking, while driving. You can join a channel and leave it at that.

Turntable isn't going anywhere because the social network designed to support it, the DJ's that were supposed to be showing up, injecting new life, have failed to deliver what was needed: interesting music selections that met diverse genre tastes.

Which, from an entirely different much larger societal dimension does fit with nirandfar's synopsis: it wasn't that individual users were overtaxed, it's that the service relies on it's social network to be keeping it fresh, yet the service was unable to promote sufficient diversity and to keep injecting different and better enough tunes to keep people coming back.

I'm largely back to smaller shoutcast stations these days, but I probably do a day and a half a week on average of Turntable.fm listening. The DJ'ing, imo, has gotten fairly routine, tends to hug some staple pop favorites, which can sometimes be mitigated with judicious channel flipping, and some times just feels terminal.

When TurnTable first launched, I was on there as a DJ almost every day. That feeling was flat-out amazing the first time I was "on the stage" in front of a large audience and everyone enjoyed my song selections. A+ experience.

However, the amount of time needed to curate your playlist and tailor songs for each crowd was extremely tiresome. It is literally a full-time job to be on the stage for a few hours. The "in-room" listening experience was not always great either. Songs were rarely "nexted" and I would find myself changing rooms more often than not.

Honestly the most enjoyable time I had on TurnTable was in a private room with 5 friends. Just casually listening to the same music while all in different offices was a great function. Other music services need that.

I just went back to check out TurnTable... and it looks like the "power-users" killed TurnTable. There is a link in the majority of the rooms like the below telling people what to play and what not to play. Freedom was the essential ingredient in TurnTable.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ApXuMqRDOAn6dDY...

It does look like most rooms have several rules. As I remember, it became a norm. Mostly as a reaction from random users getting on the decks and playing absurd stuff to kill the room's vibe. We could call them trolls.

Edit: I clicked on the spreadsheet. Having a music black list is pretty extreme. I thought you were referring to room rules; like, only playing five songs then stepping down or having a list of who is up next.

Re: Trolls - on a meta/tangential note it does seem like "troll management" (aka moderation) could alternatively be called governance - it's essentially what keeps libertarian ideas in the fantasy realm - anything involving large numbers of people undoubtedly requires extensive rules in order to keep things stable (whether they're explicit rules as in managed systems, or implicit rules where avoidance of external authorities is what keeps people in line - ie, torrent culture).

unrelated but funny.... I'm using this spreadsheet to catch up on music that I might like... Late adopters scavenging on hipster crumbs.

If you want an anything goes room you can always create your own. The Indie While You Work room has those rules because certain songs were becoming overplayed, and Nexting doesn't work there since most people are passive listeners (because they are working).

Great find. The community/culture component is an entirely separate topic but also relevant to Turntable's success (or lack thereof).

Nothing "killed" Turntable.fm, it's still going strong and has valuable features that Pandora and Spotify can't supply, such as social involvement and even music artists/producers themselves play live sets on the site.

It stinks T.fm declined rapidly. I was there for the beginning. At the time, it felt great to participate with music lovers and musicians that shared similar music tastes. As the user number grew it became harder to participate. Then, the "left of center" rooms were pushed down to the bottom after American Dubstep skyrocketed.

It was then when I began to lose interest. In the past, I would spend hours on T.fm either participating or letting it play in the background. I loved working on something in Ableton Live then sharing it with a room of people who might appreciate my work. It has been over 3 months since I last logged in to T.fm.

One can compare T.fm to Spotify and Pandora, but I never thought it served the same purpose. I would compare it more to a forum/chatroom. I doubt T.fm could compete with internet radio. But, I was convinced it would keep flourishing. To me the rooms where I hung out, became an internet home. I knew the regulars and their music tastes. It was a place for me to hang out to relax and explore music.

I agree. I don't think there's any comparison between TurnTable and other Internet radio. It is a full-on experience - more closely resembling a video game than a music radio.

I agree to some extent. Turntable is very similar to IRC/chat room; however, I would posit that most users view Turntable as a destination to listen to music, directly positioned against Pandora, Spotify, and other music services within the user's mind.

I'm in the mashup.fm room daily. For me it's invaluable as most other music streaming services don't have a wide selection of mashups which I enjoy quite a bit.

Top 20 rooms currently on TurnTable:

1) DJ Wooooo's House/Dance/Electro 2) Indie While You Work 3) Ambient Chillout & Trip Hop 4) mashup.fm 5) Dubstep 6) Trance Out! 7) Coding Soundtrack Lounge 8) #AnonFM 9) Indie Discotheque 10) Chillout Mixer, Ambient & TripHop 11) ThePhish 12) Hip Hop official 13) Hot Hitz 14) Chill or Be Chilled 15) WeHaveRobotEars.com Trance 16) Hater Free R&B and HipHop 17) Alt Nation 18) The Trap Train 19) Electronic Dance Music 20) club meem

So then the answer to "Who killed TurnTable.fm?" is: Skrillex.

Skrillex is more like a ghost that hangs around keeping the corpse shambling.

That said, serving well a pop music base is probably what drove away the cultured, eclectic sound seekers. There ain't much for nuance in the top channel listings.

That that said, the long tail still sometimes has some amazing yet small rooms, for those who don't mind the exploratory deep diving.

This is actually the first I've heard of turntable.fm (admittedly I live under a rock sometimes). All of these comments made me want to check it out until I got to this one. Literally none of these stations appeal to me based on their titles. I'll still probably check it out when I get home to see if there are any active rooms or djs with a similar taste to me.

How easy/difficult is it to find rooms/djs who might fit your taste? Every internet radio service I've ever used got very stale from replay within a month or two of heavy use.

For me was becoming restricted to the USA. I never DJed, but I let it run for hours in the background.

I am not productive at all when I use Turntable. Brain cycles are definitely wasted when I use it.

I found plug.dj to be much easier (and most people are moving over from ttfm). linking YouTube and soundcloud playlists is much easier than uploading mp3s

It doesn't work outside of USA?

At first it was open internationally but then they ran into legal issues because every country has different regulations and record labels, etc. I don't know all the details, but to avoid it, they shut out international traffic. Countries like Japan that sprang on to Turntable couldn't use it anymore.

Which is the reason I stopped playing with it. I'm in Canada. As so many of my friends from different countries were on it but not from the US, I suppose the drop may have been quite substantial.

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