
Turntable.fm: Where Did Our Love Go? - aaronbrethorst
http://www.inc.com/magazine/201205/burt-helm/turntable-founders-sxsw-where-did-our-love-go.html
======
peterwwillis
Articles like this make me glad I don't have a startup so I don't have to go
to SXSW.

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.

~~~
rdl
I guarantee you that if you do an enterprise technology (or even a "hard tech"
startup of any kind, or infrastructure, or most kinds of b2b), your investors
will not ask you to go to SXSW.

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thethimble
I was a big turntable user last summer. I was pretty disappointed by their
interface (fixed width, terrible search, etc.). So disappointed that I built
my own clone with a friend.

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!

~~~
jacksonmohsenin
I agree with the fixed width thing. I whipped up a responsive turntable
concept and sent it over to them, but heard nothing. Check it out here:

[http://jacksonmohsenin.com/2012/04/14/3-day-project-
turntabl...](http://jacksonmohsenin.com/2012/04/14/3-day-project-turntable-fm-
responsive-design/)

~~~
stevensacks
We saw it Jackson. Had you sent something like that to us about our site, you
would have definitely heard back from us. From everything we've heard, that's
a fundamental difference between us and them. We care about our users, our
community and the people who give of their own time to help make our site
better out of sheer love.

------
timmaah
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.

~~~
fumar
"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.

~~~
draggnar
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.

~~~
dandelany
I, too, lament the loss of our international users. We're working hard to
allow access from outside the US, but it's a slow process. That said, there is
still an active J-pop room on TT, although it's not as popular as it once was:
<http://turntable.fm/jpop_jgame_anime_>

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richardlblair
I'm Canadian. When they had to cut out international traffic they lost me, and
all my friends. I loved this service, so much, but unfortunately using a proxy
was just too much work for a little music.

Best of luck to the Turntable team. I hope Chasen comes around, the service
has a lot of great potential.

~~~
beilabs
I was a fan over here in Australia and the day they blocked the international
users was the day they lost me forever! Now I'm hooked on <http://di.fm> \-
Notch had a live code and I think that's what turned me onto it.

~~~
stevensacks
<http://plug.dj> is available everywhere, including Canada and Australia.
Check us out.

~~~
riffraff
plug dj is nice. If only I could understand why the heck the stuff in the chat
is being translated into my language and put a stop to that it would be
awesome.

~~~
stevensacks
You can disable Chat Translation in your User Profile, and you can rollover
the translated chats to see the original message if you prefer to keep it on.

------
ericflo
I found this article to be very well-written. It's not the most intellectual
topic, but I do feel like I've gotten a pretty good window into the lives of
the founders.

~~~
dandelany
I, too, found the article to be well-written, at least from a technical
perspective. However, as a TT employee who knows the founders personally, I
didn't find it to be a particularly accurate view of their lives or
personalities. I suppose this is the danger of "well-written" articles.

------
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.

~~~
namidark
That and their TOS just throws you under the bus

~~~
dandelany
TT.FM developer here. What in particular do you find onerous about the updated
TOS? We collect very little in the way of personally identifiable information
and don't share it with anyone except on an opt-in basis (for contests, events
etc.). I happen to think our TOS is a lot better than most sites', which state
that they'll share your information with anyone they want without your
permission.

------
tseabrooks
I love the _idea_ of Turntable.. I used it off and on... But it has usability
problems that haven't seemed to improve.

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.

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haydenevans
I was annoyed at the sheer length of time it took to receive a formal
invitation. They built up hype way too early. By the time it was available I
didn't really care anymore, I had moved on to other things out of frustration.
How are you supposed to successfully launch a site in which you interact with
friends but not let anyone in (at a decent rate)?

~~~
Ogre
I think the last time I looked at it, it required an invite. I didn't care
enough to give them an email address. Or maybe it was the same as now: the
front page has "login in with Facebook" and "log in with Twitter" as the only
actions. I don't want to do either of those things. Just play me some music,
then if I like it we'll talk about logins. Pandora got that right years ago.

------
agent86
I went to check out Turntable.fm, but it turns out I can't use it - I don't
have a Facebook or Twitter account, so I can't login.

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>

~~~
frewsxcv
I use both Twitter and Facebook (unfortunately), but I would rather not have
to link my account with either of these services just to log into your website

~~~
VinyLion
Did the same with tt, and it started posting stuff on my facebook account. I
changed to plug, where i also had to use facebook to sign up. But it never
posted anything on itself or did anything, just by clicking the share button
in the room i could post it on facebook. So it's safe to use i guess.

------
companyhen
I started using <http://plug.dj> the past few weeks and I'm liking it much
more than turntable. For one, it's international and you can stream/watch
YouTube videos and play SoundCloud in the room. There's also an option to
import your Turntable playlist.

~~~
guynamedloren
Brilliant. One of those ideas that seems so obvious. As crazy as it sounds,
I'm hard pressed to believe that there is a better music source than Youtube.
Spotify, pandora, and soundcloud are shit in comparison. Youtube has
_EVERYTHING_ \- I can get any song I want (popular or not) whenever I want it,
for free.

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.

~~~
rdl
When/why did youtube become such a good music service, vs. the other services?
A lot of people seem to be saying this.

~~~
guynamedloren
Sheer quantity of music. I have yet to see another music service come close in
content to youtube. Spotify is okay, but there's a lot they don't have. And
their commercials are annoying as hell. Pandora is great, but their model
doesn't allow for selecting specific songs. Soundcloud is awesome for original
and underground tunes, but not mainstream and classic songs.

Youtube has (almost) everything.

------
jayzee
I got annoyed when I got into a disagreement with a moderator and was kicked
out of a room repeatedly.

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.

~~~
nestlequ1k
I had the exact same experience. Moderators would boot/ban you if you downvote
songs, or if you criticize anything ever. I havent touched turntable in
months.

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.

~~~
dandelany
TT developer here. Any user can "mute" any other user - just go to Settings >
Ignored Users and add their username to your ignored list. Hope to see you
back on the site soon!

~~~
mnicole
No, what he's saying is that mods need to only be able to mute users, not kick
them. Kicking someone out of the room they want to be in only hurts your
service -- not the room -- because they won't have any interest in visiting
the other rooms and they're not going to bother going back into a room they've
been kicked out of. There is truly no reason anyone should be _kicked_. It
leaves a sour taste in the user's mouth, especially if -- like those of us
posting here -- it was for no other reason than the mod's ability to do so.

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.

~~~
nestlequ1k
mnicole nailed exactly what i was trying to say. Thanks!

------
_rknLA
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 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.

~~~
antr
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

------
gkop
I love Turntable. You can upload your own music if it's missing from their
library. And they have an iPhone app that is nearly feature-paired with the
web version. Plus they were the first app to make possible live sharing DJ
queues on the web (right?). Thanks Turntable folks!

------
sad_panda
Too much effing dubstep. When a kid comes in and starts spinning that garbage,
the fans fly away.

~~~
Sivart13
This might not just be a problem with Turntable.fm.

------
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.

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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.

~~~
suking
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.

------
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.

------
CrazedGeek
Eh, I still use it. For me, it's incredibly fun to get 5-10 friends in a
(private) room and share the DJ spots. (I've never really bothered with the
public rooms and thus have not heard a barrage of dubstep.)

------
ahsanhilal
The real question is, how their new product Kiwi going to stand for itself
against other spotify apps. I know a number of music startups, and a lot of
them are making apps gunning for deeper social integration on spotify, which
seems what Kiwi might be.

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.

------
misterjangles
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.

~~~
ScottWhigham
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.

------
BrianLey
There is a behavioral disconnect on the site:

A fix is to have 2 listening modes. 1\. Passive like radio 2\. Active with
chat(capacity 150)

~~~
holyjaw
That's a solution to a problem, yes, but only to a tertiary problem. By
splitting it to listeners and cave spinners, you'd find most people are oly
listeners. The level of engagement would plummet.

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agilbert
A lot of people are talking about getting active to get all the benefits. So I
created a C++ app that bring turntable chat "alwaysOnTop"
<https://github.com/alaingilbert/ttchat> Pretty usefull ! Let me know what you
guys think about it.

------
stevengg
I joined the site pretty early when it was filled with mostly music snobs like
me. every room filled to the brim with people playing mostly less heard tracks
as it got bigger and more and more new users joined a lot of the snobs left
making it less fun for me.

------
kin
Does anyone think it would benefit turntable to also present itself as an app
inside Spotify?

------
nickpresta
I ended up switching to Pandora + Grooveshark + Soundcloud. I can get all my
music, mixes, and discovery through these three services.

~~~
redthrowaway
Yes, except now you're stuck with Grooveshark's hideous "stop what you're
doing and watch this ad or I'm taking my ball and going home" nonsense. I gave
Spotify a go, but I'm not a big fan of having to download a native client for
what can clearly be done online.

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goo
Screw them for publishing stuff to my facebook feed, and not allowing me to
listen otherwise. It's terrible, but I still but up for it for some unknown
reason. I have no sympathy.

~~~
dandelany
Publishing to your Facebook feed can be turned off by going to the lobby page
> Settings > Contact Settings. This has been the case from the first day we
published FB feed stuff, and we tried to inform users about it with a yellow
banner at the top of the lobby page.

~~~
goo
Thank you, this should be opt-in, not opt out.

------
sturmeh
You blocked Australia, so you tell me. :\

~~~
stevensacks
<http://plug.dj> is available in Australia. In fact, our backend developer
lived in Brisbane until recently.

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suking
Who didn't see this coming... Hype... funding... doa.

------
twinturbo
Simple, you are expendable. Give your user's a reason to say. Give them a
product they're willing to pay for and can't live without.

