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Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

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Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#51

Post by sherwin »

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.

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#52

Post by antr »

_rknLA wrote: post #50

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…

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

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#53

Post by jcc80 »

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.

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#54

Post by majani »

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.

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#55

Post by ScottWhigham »

misterjangles wrote: post #26

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.

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.

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#56

Post by dogas »

stevensacks wrote: post #39
reustle wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you behind www.Plug.dj

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…

I checked it out, and it's impressive. It's what turntable.fm should have been. Kudos!

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#57

Post by draggnar »

fumar wrote: post #6
timmaah wrote: post #3

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.

"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.

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.

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#58

Post by rglover »

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.

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#59

Post by suking »

majani wrote: post #54

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.

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.

Re: Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go?

#60

Post by namidark »

rglover wrote: post #58

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…

That and their TOS just throws you under the bus
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