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Bad news for Turntable.FM as Facebook launch collaborative music listening

Long time readers will remember that I raved about Turntable.FM last summer. It truly changed my music consumption habits within a week.

Of course the music industry quickly identified it as a threat, rather than a solution to solve their fucked business model, and forced Turntable.FM to block all traffic from the US. As I wrote at the time, these actions are pointless as it is easy to spoof a US IP address. Still the hassle eroded the group I was regularly DJ'ing with and my usage dropped off to near zero.

What a huge missed opportunity.

I've been keeping tabs on Turntable.FM's attempts to secure the licensing they need to re-open to non US customers, but so far silence.

Then the news I'm sure they were dreading. Facebook announced on Thursday that they were launching "Listen with" which basically does exactly what Turntable.FM does, except of course you are locked into the Facebook platform.

The blog post says it is rolling out now, and I assume that Facebook have enough lawyers, muscle and money to make the music labels play nice. Its amusing reading the comments on the blog post praising Facebook for coming up with such a cool idea.

Whilst writing this post I checked in on Turntable.FM for any news and the site was down. I'm not sure if that was scheduled maintenance, or coincidence, but their Twitter account hasn't posted for 48 hours either. There is no mention of the Facebook announcement in their stream.

I can hear the biting of lips in New York from here.

Tagged Music facebook social turntable.fm

Posted

Turntable.FM blocked outside USA

Following on from my popular Turntable.FM post, it seems the virtual party is temporarily over for people outside of America. I actually broke the news an hour before the official confirmation from Turntable's own Twitter account;

which immediately led to an outcry by followers who, like me, have become hooked on the service over the past week.

After tweeting about the block pretty much as soon as it happened, I haven't had a chance to sit down and write about it. In the couple of days that has passed a few other posts have sprung up talking about the block, so I'd recommend you read the GigaOm post announcing it, which interestingly states Turntable.FM have picked up 140,000 users. <rant warning> Let me just say music industry "what are you doing?" A few years ago I worked on a music product and I vowed I would never go near music from a business perspective ever again. This weeks shenanigans just re-enforces that frustration. Just why an industry in terminal decline insists on strangling any innovation which may actually give it a life line is just beyond me, and extinguishes any sympathy for their continued struggles. (ref Spotify entering new markets) If only they spent as much energy on innovating and revisiting antiquated licensing policies, as they do taking kids to court for illegal downloading. </rant> So I'll join thousands of our non US users waiting for some breakthrough in the problems. In the mean time...

Tagged Music turntable.fm

Posted

OMG I'm in love with Turntable.FM

Yesterday I read a post on GigaOm highlighting New York based startup Turntable.FM. Om called it one of the new wave of services behind the "alive web". Off the back of that recommendation I spent last night experimenting. OMG, without sounding too gushing this could represent the future of music discovery. I've pretty much tried every digital music service that has came out in the last decade. Long ago I switched from pay per download services like iTunes to subscription / streaming services that actually help you discover new music. My current favourite is Spotify, however there is a big difference between Spotify and Turntable.FM - real time personal recommendation. This is how Turntable.FM works. You become a virtual DJ playing tracks you love to your online audience. People can vote on the songs you play gaining you DJ points and you can follow (or fan) people you like, and vice versa. Depending how much work you want to do you can just hang out in rooms and listen without playing anything yourself. Sign up is a little confusing. I think you need to have at least one friend on Facebook using it to make it in but there is no way of checking which of your friends have it. I'm not sure how strict this is, but I got in without any problem. If after reading this, if you want to try it out just send a friend request to my business Facebook account 'James BlueVia Parton', I'll friend you, then you should have no problems. Once you are in, you have two options. Either create your own room to start spinning tracks, or search the list of other rooms and jump in to listen. If there is a spare DJ slot, jump up to the decks and start playing. A nice little quirk is your laptop in front of your avatar is shown as either a Mac or Win box depending on what O/S you are running. I've yet to see anything but Mac's (which may say something right there), but I deduced this from the screenshot shown in the Gigaom article, reproduced here.

There is a chat window so you can interact with people in the room, plus the voting / fan features I've already mentioned. You can promote the room you are playing in via shout outs on Facebook, Twitter and email. Last night I wasted three hours in a blink of an eye. I should say 'invested' rather than wasted, because any music fan will love this. I started a room banging out Goth tunes (don't ask!). My Twitter promo got @creativegeek into my room and we started trading tracks and messages. Then Tom randomly came into the room, and 2 or so hours later I'm now listening to five new bands I've never heard before. If that isn't the future of music discovery then I don't know what is. Having real people listen to what you like and then recommend stuff is so much more powerful than algorithm based services like Last.FM. UK music fans should be all over this like a rash as it becomes a perfect 'plug in' for Spotify. As I got played a new track I liked I just popped up Spotify and starred the top 5 tracks of each artist for future listening. Genius! So no excuses - rush out and start DJ'ing, it is so addictive. I've been back on the site since 6:45 am this morning in an Indie Rock room. There are a few opportunities to improve it though:

The labelling of tracks is a little misleading - you think you have picked a killer track to impress your room with, but it turns out to be a remix or live version which can piss you off a little.
It doesn't scrobble to Last.FM - this would be awesome to log what you are listening to for future reference
It seems pretty intensive on your browser - I've seen a few people crash out, and a couple of times my Mac has become unresponsive for a moment
You don't get to see the play list of any of the other DJ's in the room. I'm not sure if this is good or bad. It does mean you listen without predicuce to up coming songs, as @creativegeek pointed out to me last night

Anyway, get online, and become a fan of DJ Ralph Malph ;-)

Tagged Music social turntable.fm

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