You spin me right round! Is Turntable.fm as valuable as the music people visit the site to hear? 

Newsflash: Maybe not!

But Kanye West and Lady Gaga invested in this, how could they be wrong?

I think we'll learn over the next 18 months to stay clear of ANY investment these celebrities make.

It is not going to ever be mainstream if it continues to be the way it is.  Too bad for those that invested expecting more but it is the best networking site I know.  I've connected with bands, developers, and other really cool people that are as passionate about music as I am.  It's always the same handful of regulars in the room I frequent and we like that even though we are always very warm and welcoming to new DJs.  I wouldn't want it to be at some massive scale anyways...

I agree, its a great feature but its just not a product on it's own.  They need to pivot a bit to be able to grow, continuing to have the current offering available but as a feature of a larger vision.

The good news for Turntable.FM is they have a good name and people are willing to check out what they do so I think a pivot would work in their favor.

My advice:

- The current product should be a feature of a bigger product offering

- Simplify and make it useable for any circumstance, gamification is fun for a while but loses its luster especially when it's a time suck.  It also is hard to use the service while at work because it feels like you're playing a game not listening to music.

- Make it more intuative, eliminate the amount of work people need to put into it to make it valuable.

- Make it easier for people to DJ in successful rooms, people go to the site wanting to be involved but the vast majority of their user base can't actually participate.

Really interesting thoughts on the turntable app. We should talk. I'd love to hear more of your thoughts. Shoot me an email @ musicappman at gmail.com

- The current product should be a feature of a bigger product offering

I think this is what facebook is trying to do with their new shared listening feature that supports spotify/rdio/etc and quite clearly it is not even remotely on par with Turntable's offering. I don't think the site could ever be as big as facebook or itunes but I think it has the potential to be significantly bigger than it currently is if the global access problem can be solved. The site has a tonne of character and that would be lost if it were just an add-on of another site. This is the sort of thing that facebook could never hope to acheive.

- Simplify and make it useable for any circumstance, gamification is fun for a while but loses its luster especially when it's a time suck.  It also is hard to use the service while at work because it feels like you're playing a game not listening to music.

I totally agree with the innapropriateness at work problem, but it would be very difficult to cater to all use cases and still retain a distinctive character. Someone could just make a browser plugin that tweaks the css to hide the dancefloor for when you want to use it at work (this is on my list of ideas to do, but I've got better ideas higher up in my list)

The time suck can be a pretty big problem - but it's pretty much saying the problem is that the site is just too awesome. But it actually is a problem - I had to quit using the site because it was taking up too much of my time and it was killing my productivity!

I actually spent quite an amount of effort developing a separate site that hooked into the (unofficial) API and it attempted to solve this very problem. I won't go into details on exactly what it did, but I eventually gave up as I saw tt.fm's usage continue to fall. I will definitely resume the project up again if the current upward trend continues. 

- Make it more intuative, eliminate the amount of work people need to put into it to make it valuable.

I think they did a pretty great job of making the site intuitive and that would account for a lot of the site's success where many other shared listening sites have failed. This stuff is HARD. Do you have any concrete suggestions?

- Make it easier for people to DJ in successful rooms, people go to the site wanting to be involved but the vast majority of their user base can't actually participate.

I totally agree. Although their new room list helps somewhat in finding rooms that have free DJ slots. All this could still certainly been improved. What has team tt.fm been doing since the site launched almost a year ago? There have been only very minor changes or improvements, but their team seems reasonably large.. and what have they been doing with the $7MM investment?

Its still very early in the company's history and they'll have plenty of time to get widespread appeal. The better numbers to look at would be App Data (since many users log in with Facebook) which says they are making some gains in MAU http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/127146244018710-turntable

another thing to keep in mind is that they recently added twitter sign in support whereas previously it was facebook only. Hard to say whether that would have had a big effect on uptake, but it's something that appdata.com wouldn't be measuring (the trend could only be better, even if only slightly better). There are definitely people who use facebook but refuse to sign into sites through facebook. I'd be very interested to know what the general statistic on that is. Some people seem to trust Twitter more for sign ins.

Hmm... I don't care as long as I can play...

TUrntable.fm is too "cartoony". Try Jelli. (http://jelli.com)

You should check out LetsListen, it's not cartoony and it's a group listening service + music locker.  Since you own the music in your locker, you get full control over how it's played.  

I see your site as being pretty much turntable.fm but while the focus with turntable.fm is on the social, with yours the focus is more on being more of an amazon/google music style cloud locker. Yeah it has a lot of the same social features as tt.fm but the itunes-like UX places the focus on your app being more of a conventional music player than being a new type of listening environment (where alot of the novelty of tt.fm is derived)

Turntable.fm is essentially a music locker with a simplistic music player (the queue), but one that limits it to sample playback because the site respects liscensing laws (perhaps a little to stringently). I find it hard to believe that you would have the proper liscensing in place, but I don't any real moral issues with what you are doing.

I think your site is either trying to be turntable.fm but without the fun or trying to compete with behemoths like google/amazon/apple. Yeah they don't have the group listening features but investing time into a cloud locker is a big commitment (in terms of the switching cost of moving to another service) and it would be hard to convince people to use a little known site when people have trust in companies like apple/amazon/google. There's also Facebook's new group listening feature.

There are good reasons for having visual rooms and avatars (even if a few people might be put off by them) but the reasons are counterintuivite.

Don't get me wrong though, I'm sure your site will be great if you can manage to get hundreds of thousands of people to use it. I would definitely consider using it, but you need to somehow get past the critical mass phase (which turntable.fm amazingly managed to do) phase - and this is the hardest part.

Chill.fm's pivot to more of a video recommendation site is sited as more evidence that group listening sites don't work, but chill.fm was just riding the coattails of tt.fm's success and I don't think video works for group listening/watching in the same way that music does. I think there are actually some benefits to not having the video clip playing. 

They still have a chance for the site to be huge if they can figure out a way of getting global liscenses (like how it was before they siloed it to the US). I'm suprised record companies aren't helping them out to achieve this - i think this site can promote mp3 purchase in a big way because of this scenario:

You're about to DJ and you've thought of the perfect song...but...DAMN!... of course the the lame builtin library doesn't have it. You've only got 3 minutes... what to do? ...upload from my collection but ...damn! I only have it in m4a format....conversion will take too long.... download it from a an illegal site and then upload it? That will take too long!! If only I could pay for it with paypal and have it appear immediately so I can DJ it before it's too late, I would totally do that, even though i've never previously paid for digital downloads.

The site was amazing / fucking amazing / unbelievably awesome in the first couple of months when there were 400K users and it was available globally. The downwards trend coincided at exactly the same time as the shut it down globally. Now it's more like 100K and it's just too few users to support eclectic taste. It's always the same generic indie and dubstep rooms now. By the way, that compete.com site, while the genearl trend is maybe reasonably accurate, the numbers are way off. Appdata.com seems to have much more accurate numbers - and according to the latest data: things are looking slightly up! It was definitely pretty bad for a while. Perhaps the new facebook integration stuff has helped revive it a bit? Hopefully the trend will continue. This site has the potential to be (and was for a brief time) wayyy more fun and interesting then spotify, rdio or anything else combined.

see the latest data:

http://www.appdata.com/apps/facebook/127146244018710-turntable

I know what you guys are saying about it being kind of good at the moment because it's really niche and close knit, but there is no limit on the number of rooms that can be created, or how obscure you can make the flavour of the room, so I think the more people the better. They just need some algorithms to help you find rooms you would be interested in (it wouldn't be difficult)

Turntable.fm is awesome but why'd they have to shut it off to the rest of the world....WHY???????   (well, i know why.. it just sucks that that's the current state of music liscensing)

One last thing: one big reason for tt.fm's initial hype was the media giving it an excessive amount of attention (this is probably a big reason why they had to shut it off... they got so much attention and got scared even though they probably could have gotten away with keeping it global - if they were so concerned about getting caught in the first place, why didn't they shut it off in the beginning?) They would have been treading very murky legal waters, but i don't think many people would have any moral qualms with it, and they could have kept under the radar enough for the legalities to not be a big enough issue. Music laws are still a very grey area.

The media has the power to make and break websites. So think of the consequences before publishing things like, 'this site was a fad and now it's dead' and basing that on totally innacurate sources like compete.com and taking that as gospel.