Posts from Turntable

Turntable 2.0 and Passion Pit

The folks at Turntable aren't calling it 2.0, but it sure feels like a massive upgrade to me so that's what I call it when I talk about the new UI and big rooms concept that Turntable quietly launched yesterday without much fanfare.

Full disclosure, USV is an investor in Turntable and I am on the board.

Turntable.fm, for those that don't know, is a live social music experience. Anyone can start a room in the service and a room features up to five users who jump up on stage and take turns DJing, and then the rest of the folks in the room listen, rate the songs, and chat. It is the most social music experience I have ever experienced online. I spend most mornings between 5am and 7am eastern hanging out in Turntable. Like most social online services, I have friends there who I have never met in person. I get better music discovery at Turntable from people I have never met than I get from anywhere else.

It makes sense if you think about it. Folks who are so passionate about music that they get up on stage and DJ live in front of everyone else will also likely have spent countless hours finding music that nobody else knows about yet. That's how music has always worked and how it will always work.

Turntable's achilles heel has always been that the rooms didn't scale. In version 1.0, when a room got to 200 people, it closed up to new entrants. So if you showed up looking to get into your favorite room you could often be out of luck. That is not and never was a good user experience.

Worse is that when a musician, artist, or celebrity showed up in one of the rooms, only 200 of their fans could get in to hear what they were up to. So the whole viral nature of an artist with hundreds of thousands or even millions of fans tweeting out that they are in a room in Turntable was mostly wasted in version 1.0.

All of that has been fixed in Turntable 2.0. The rooms scale up as more users show up. The UI changes in real time. A room starts out feeling like a tiny club and could end up feeling like an arena concert. Here's an example of a "big room" in action:

Turnable big rooms

It's a real work of UI art and kudos go out to Billy and Byron for their work in building the new Turntable UI.

They've also made a bunch of smaller changes, cleaned some things up, moved some things around, speeded it up considerably, and made the service easier to join and get into quickly. I've been watching this new version emerge over the past few months and am so excited as a user to be able to experience it myself now.

If you want to see a big room in action, you can log into Turntable today at 3pm eastern to catch the electropop act Passion Pit playing some of their songs in Turntable. I expect that room will fill up nicely. I am going to try to get in and check it out myself in between running around SF between meetings. I hope to see you there.

#mobile#Music#Web/Tech

The First Online Mashup Music Festival

I love emergent behavior inside web services. When the users take over and start doing stuff you never imagined, you know you've got something.

Next week, on Dec 7th, the core users of Turntable's three mashup rooms are hosting an online event with some of the top mashup DJs in the world.

Here are the details:

Dec 7th 8-11 PM EST All Mashup rooms – Mashupfm1, Mashupfm2, and the Mashupfm VIP room – are hosting what could be Turntable's, and possibly the internet's, first online Music "festival"

20+ DJs including:
3LAU, Yoni, Basic Physics, DJ Trademark, Kap Slap, DJ DiBella, Wick-It, Desler, Bruneaux, DJ abSRD, Dotcom, DJ Graycat, DJ Strongarm, DJ Rudy, The Airport District, DJ Bahler, Nammo, Mitch-Mash and More

These mashup rooms are some of the most fun rooms in the turntable service. You get crazy stuff in them all the time. Here's my favorite of them if you want to check it out in advance.

I've got this in my calendar. Hope to see you there.

Note: An earlier version of this post had the event from 3pm to 8pm eastern. That was incorrect. I apologize for the error.

#Web/Tech

Feature Friday: DJs Needed

Richard F has been urging me to talk about features I love every friday. I am not committing to make this a weekly feature (no pun intended). One weekly committment is enough. But I will try to run posts about features I love and new features on Fridays under this moniker.

Today, I'd like to talk about something Turntable added this week that I really like. They launched a new lobby page. It looks like this (at 6:30am eastern before most of the US has woken up):

Turntable lobby

We are looking at the view called "DJs needed". This view lets you quickly see the busiest rooms in the service where there are DJ spots available.

Before this feature was released, all you would see in the lobby was the busiest rooms. But the real thrill of Turntable is getting up on stage and seeing if you can deliver the goods. I do it at least three of four times a week. It's a kick.

This feature was among the most commonly requested things users have asked for since the Turntable service launched. Harking back to yesterday's post about focusing on your loyal users, I believe one of the keys to success early in a company's life is listening closely to the users and then delivering quickly on the things they ask for. That creates trust and loyalty, two important traits in an early user base.

So now when you visit Turntable, click on the DJs needed icon in the lobby, and go into a room and start showing your stuff. I think you'll enjoy it. I certainly do.

#My Music#Web/Tech