This couldn’t come at a worse time, especially for a company struggling against sagging traffic levels and fleeting buzz. But Turntable.fm is now being forced to remove tracks from DJ queues, based on – you guessed it – licensing disputes.
This is the type of prompt that users with ‘offending content’ are now receiving.
… which leads to this rather vague information.
So who’s kiboshing the queue? The early chatter suggests a number of rights holders, with issues dating back months. Initially, we heard EMI was causing problems, yet Coldplay tracks were easily uploaded. Fedde Le Grand suggests Ultra, yet Kaskade was added without issue.
Which means we’ll probably be updating as more details and tips come in. For now, Turntable is asking its users to hang tight with the following message:
“Recently you may have noticed a little alert at the bottom of your queue letting you know that some songs had been removed. Here’s what’s going on with that…”
We license our content from multiple rights holders. Rights holders can be anything from music labels to digital distributors to artists themselves. From time to time, for reasons beyond our control, rights holders will remove certain tracks from our catalog. This will result in certain songs in your queue suddenly becoming unplayable.”
I don’t feel sorry for them. The entire time they were at their height they insisted on being married to Facebook exclusively. Now they have open it back up due to a sharp decrease in users. Too late, those users they turned away don’t care anymore. From what I have heard it isn’t worth anyone’s time. The loss of licenses just makes it even more dead.
Can we just declare turntable.fm dead?
Long-live plug.dj!!
International & no restrictions on what you can play for friends.
@ Forrest…
but is it legal?
I’m no lawyer but YouTube & SoundCloud have been allowing people to embed their media players on websites for quite some time now. I don’t see how this is any different. Do you?
Age old story. It always comes down to licensing.
They didn’t see this one coming?
Now falling into the licensing lawsuit line…
I think we all knew that turntable.fm was nothing more than a trend.
it just gets worse 🙁
Good!! Another one bites the dust. +1 to Musicians
So, how exactly musicians are winning from this?
Don’t worry Artist doesn’t know HOW musicians win with this news on Turntable.fm. But the self-wounding bitterness sure comes through doesn’t it?
Artist, have you ever used Turntable? I can’t tell you how many artists I’ve discovered using the site, which have led to money in musicians’ pockets. Albums, merch, concert tickets, you name it — they wouldn’t have received those dollars if I hadn’t fortuitously heard their track on the site.
Now go and finish brewing my soy mocha latte, you starving “artist.”
Well, that’s pretty much how I feel about these things, too.
I was just wondering, how many of those users, who now couldn’t find track/artist they were hoping to, rushed to shop to buy a record, because it wasn’t available for “free” listening…
Ahah “Artist” is a dumb slut working in RIAA offices or such, there’s one comment like this on every article.
I’m shocked that labels are pulling songs from Turntable.fm. But mostly I’m shocked that turntable.fm is still a thing.
This makes me sad, I want turntable.fm to do well
Songs are added and removed all the time to all (legal) online music services. Turntable is not a part of any “disputes” with labels (they have licenses with all the majors), but it’s very possible that an artist is disputing what rights their label has with regard to how their music is distributed. Just because some songs are removed does not mean they won’t find their way back onto the service, and it also does not mean that the library is shrinking – new music is being added all the time. Turntable is a legal service… lawsuits need not apply.
Not true, they first started preventing some uploads way back in June and now are addressing APB style the latest takedowns. This is a bigger issue.
Here is Spotify’s FAQ entry regarding this exact same issue: http://www.spotify.com/us/help/faq/content/artist-disappeared/
These aren’t “takedowns” like what is found on YouTube, these are changes to licensing agreements. Takedowns are what YouTube does to user-generated content when a copyright owner claims that the content is infringing. The songs being removed from queues on Turntable are songs that were in their searchable library but are no longer avilable due to licensing restrictions. They’re not in any sort of trouble, they’re simply obeying their licensing agreements. This same thing happens on Spotify and other music services.