#rolling.fm

One good turn(table) deserves another, one might say. Hot on the heels of Turntable.fm’s big reported round of funding comes Rolling.fm, a clone that does just about everything the original service does. Will it achieve the same popularity? Who knows, but we’re impressed that someone has already launched such a complete knock-off of the Turntable.fm concept.

  Rolling.fm is a part of Tenka.com, a “social media advertising startup” registered to its o-founder and chief product officer Tim Zhou, who was a senior software engineer at Google from April 2008 to June 2010, according to his LinkedIn profile, and worked at IBM before that. His co-creation, whose domain he registered on June 27 — as Turntable.fm was gathering steam — is a group-listening room very much along the lines of Turntable.fm that encourages people to turn themselves into cute little avatars to play music for each other and chat about it; part of a big and growing group-listening phenomenon happening this year. You log in to Rolling.fm with Facebook, just like with Turntable.fm. You “become a DJ to play music for everyone in the room” from either a central catalog or your own hard drive; earn credits for playing stuff people like; vote songs “hot” or “weak”; and use credits to buy new outfits for your avatar. The service is divided into browsable rooms (or you can go to a random one), and as a song loads, the front of the DJ stage displays a pithy, preloaded statement telling you to hold your horses. All of this is precisely identical to Turntable.fm, except the avatars, rooms and people look a little different. Oh, and when you like a song, it’s “hot” instead of “awesome” — dislike it, and it’s “weak” instead of “lame.” Plus, there’s a cat sitting on the speakers and the DJs rotate through to the same laptop instead of using their own. Granted, Rolling.fm brings a few additions to the Turntable.fm feature set, such as the ability to see who is in a room in one big list, and a private chat feature that lets you speak directly to Facebook friends even if they’re in a different room. But really, it’s a shameless copy of Turntable.fm. Should Zhou and company be ashamed? Who cares? The world needs all the neat ways to listen to music it can get, from where we’re standing. It’s a case of “the more the merrier” — even if Rolling.fm is quite possibly the least original web app we’ve ever seen. It’s also a case of “different strokes for different folks. The Rolling.fm group-listening web app differs from Turntable.fm in that many of the most popular rooms correlate to specific colleges and universities (although anyone can join those rooms). And so far, we’re hearing far clubbier and less indie music than we generally hear on Turntable.fm. Who knows — we could be just about to witness an explosion of group listening services, each with its own twist on the Turntable.fm concept that will appeal to a different demographic. While Turntable.fm deserves ample credit for coming up with the concept, it can’t really be bad for music fans if that concept continues to be replicated as it has been here — at least until the patent lawyers get involved.

少し前に、仮想ディスコのサービスとして話題になっていた「turntable.fm」ってご存知ですか？TechCrunch JAPANのこの記事を読んだ時、音楽好きの僕としては、なんて楽しそうなんだ！、とサービスを利用したくてしたくて、たまりませんでした。招待制になっていたので、そのうち誰かに招待してもらおうと思っていたのですが、なんと著作権の関係で日本では利用できなくなってしまいました； でも、先日、偶然似たようなサービスを見つけたのです。その名も「Rolling.fm」。

Actually, there are better things a smart software engineer can do with his time and money than build a complete rip-off of a service that is less than three months old. As a ploy to get acqui-hired by Facebook for its secret Vibes project, this is pretty clever. But in terms of its contribution to the start-up ecosystem, music or otherwise, its a bad precedent and a poor example.

pretty much summarizes how I feel about it.

“Some of the core elements may be similar (to Turntable), I’ll grant you that, but our goals for the site are much different,” said Rolling co-founder and former Google senior software engineer Tim Zhou in an interview with VentureBeat. “We are going for a much more social angle here. The end goal is not to become a music curation tool.”

“We’re more interested in building a social space for communication, where people can hang out, chat, play card games, listen to music or whatever,” Zhou said. “Music is the initial wedge, but we want to branch out,” he said, making reference to integrating YouTube videos to play in the background while people chat in one of the rooms.

All well and good, and I encourage them to branch out.  However, it seems a little fishy to me that they decided to launch their service ONLY with music - not to mention they basically made their site, well, exactly like turntable.fm (as the article describes...)

Like Turntable.fm, Rolling.fm users can only access the service through Facebook. Rolling also turns its users into personalized cartoon-ish avatars that can access virtual music rooms where a handful of DJs play songs from a particular genre, interest or locality.

And again, like Turntable.fm, Rolling allows the audience to vote on each song. If enough people hate the song selection, it gets skipped in favor of the next DJ in line. When people like a song, points are awarded to DJ, who can redeem them for avatar upgrades.

Yet Zhou claims he came up with the idea on his own:

“Once we figured out what we wanted to do, we discovered Turntable.fm, which had just launched not even a month ago,” Zhou said. “At first we were distraught since someone was already occupying the space. But ultimately we decided that, that shouldn’t deter us from jumping in anyways.”

More like, "it shouldn't deter us from copying turntable.fm."

I love the idea of social music, and I hope people continue to explore the idea with their own unique twists.  Right now, rolling.fm doesn't really have that.  Sure, you can privately chat with a Facebook friend, but that's such a minor feature I don't see how it makes rolling.fm significantly different.  I do think Zhou's vision for rolling.fm sounds cool.  But that's not what it is right now.  Right now it is a complete turntable.fm ripoff, and until I actually see these other potential features (videos, games, etc), that's how I'll think of it.

Oh, and

For instance, Rolling’s point system subtracts points from a DJ if they play a song that the room doesn’t like. By contrast, Turntable.fm’s points can only be gained and/or redeemed. This poses a problem because the most of the extremely popular music rooms are always dominated by a handful of the same Turntable.fm DJs. Rolling avoids this problem by kicking DJs off the virtual stage after their second skipped track.

Actually, if a DJ has their song skipped three times in a row on turntable, they're also kicked off stage.  So that isn't a unique feature to rolling.fm.  

One bonus point for rolling, though -

Another big feature that distinguishes Rolling from other music services is the option to change the skin of a room. Zhou’s initial skin template moves the music party into a large public restroom. Users can interact with the space by putting graffiti on the walls. 

The Restroom Experience is an example of how Zhou and the team can build different experiences that can then be monetized by creating rooms for marketing and promotional purposes. So, for example, if HBO wanted to run a series of True Blood promotions, they could pay Rolling to create a Fangtasia lounge (which is a popular venue referred to in the HBO original vampire TV show).

You log in to Rolling.fm with Facebook, just like with Turntable.fm. You “become a DJ to play music for everyone in the room” from either a central catalog or your own hard drive; earn credits for playing stuff people like; vote songs “hot” or “weak”; and use credits to buy new outfits for your avatar. The service is divided into browsable rooms (or you can go to a random one), and as a song loads, the front of the DJ stage displays a pithy, preloaded statement telling you to hold your horses.

All of this is precisely identical to Turntable.fm, except the avatars, rooms and people look a little different. Oh, and when you like a song, it’s “hot” instead of “awesome” — dislike it, and it’s “weak” instead of “lame.” Plus, there’s a cat sitting on the speakers and the DJs rotate through to the same laptop instead of using their own.

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A former Google employee has built a Turntable.fm clone.