The music 2.0 crusade continues at Turntable
June 22, 2011 8:27 PM   Subscribe

Turntable.fm DJ for a virtual room at the newest attempt at music-sharing 2.0. Listeners can vote songs up or down, or DJ themselves. Other similar projects like Muxtape and Listening Room have unfortunately not survived long.
posted by melissam (14 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
See also memebake's Mefi Project site GoodListnr, which has tried to get around the die-off problem with pre-arranged group session times. There's also narwhal bacon's Collaborative Jukebox, and probably one more I'm forgetting. It's a popular idea, for sure. (Mandatory Facebook sign-ins don't help, though. Blech.)
posted by Rhaomi at 8:38 PM on June 22, 2011 [3 favorites]


throwing http://mixapp.com/ into the mix here too
posted by mulligan at 8:49 PM on June 22, 2011


I've been playing around in TT for a while. They're going to have several issues (beyond coping with adding more Amazon S3 services). The RIAA is not going to like that people can upload whatever they want to, and since you can search what other people have posted to add to your own DJ list, their uploaded catalog is already a metadata nightmare. Try searching for any popular song and you'll see 15 different remixes and several without the right metadata encoded. It's a great idea but I could see it becoming a Facebook app or a new feature for Pandora, not a standalone service.
posted by msbutah at 8:49 PM on June 22, 2011 [1 favorite]


Other similar projects like Muxtape and Listening Room have unfortunately not survived long.

Okay first of all, <3 Metafilter's effort on this. But, Turntable.fm is popular for basically one reason: You don't have to do anything to upload songs. You search, you select the song and that is it.

If you depend on the user for having whatever song they want to play, that alienates 99% of the audience. Not me, because I'm a hero and awesome music nerd, but most people aren't like me. They don't have huge libraries accessible at work or wherever they happen to be. They know what music they want to play, but they don't have it on their local drive.

So the fact this is a success is not surprising, the fact it gets by the RIAA by some magic is.
posted by geoff. at 8:54 PM on June 22, 2011


Last night a DJ saved my life.

But I forgot to vote him up.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 9:02 PM on June 22, 2011 [2 favorites]


Cool concept. It occurs to me that what needs to happen is for this to get bought by a site like Mog or Grooveshark. You'd eliminate the need for uploading tracks and solve the metadata problem by having a huge catalog of legitimate tracks. You also wouldn't need the hoops to jump through like having a minimum number of DJs in a room; it would just be another way of interacting with an existing service.
posted by roll truck roll at 9:14 PM on June 22, 2011


Actually, Listening Room is out of private beta and Abe is still planning on growing it. Unfortunately, some of the bugs are still present. I spent a couple days there earlier this week and my audio would still inexplicably die, necessitating a page reload. It was frustrating enough to not want to return. He's also aware of Turntable, but thinks there's room for both. I agree.

My own project is put on temporary hold as summer is finally here in the Pacific Northwest, which means more outdoor time and less indoor time during my non-working ours. People are still welcome to stop by Mix Party, or please visit GoodListnr (which is the new hotness) instead.
posted by narwhal bacon at 9:39 PM on June 22, 2011 [2 favorites]


The problem isn't so much the Facebook sign-in, but the Facebook sign-in that also requires knowing somebody who already uses the service. The main link is basically a splash page for the 99% of people who haven't been invited yet.

I'm surprised it hasn't been deleted yet.
posted by Rhaomi at 10:38 PM on June 22, 2011




Turntable is refreshingly short on Flash. It's almost entirely HTML, Javascript, and CSS. In fact when I load it up in Chrome I see zero Flash resources. Hurray!
posted by mkb at 2:54 AM on June 23, 2011


The facebook sign-in thing keeps me from using it at work. And keeps me from turning off the unending email notifications of when people I "liked" start DJing in another room. (These are VERY easy to turn off. I just didn't notice the emails until I was at work)

That said, I enjoyed the site a lot for several hours. I give it until July 1 before some lawyer ruins the kids' fun.
posted by DigDoug at 4:51 AM on June 23, 2011


My friends and I have been digging the hell out of Turntable for the past couple of weeks. If you don't have the time or inclination, it's essentially internet radio with your friends picking the songs. And if you do have the attention to spare, you can have awesome DJ battles.
posted by miskatonic at 8:12 AM on June 23, 2011


Why do we need any music service other than Grooveshark?
posted by Afroblanco at 9:10 AM on June 23, 2011




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