TURNTABLE.FM TAKEOVER

Chill comes from the founders of Ad.ly and Namesake, and is very similar to Turntable.fm in style and execution. You must have a Facebook friend already on Chill in order to join. Once you choose an avatar, you can either create a room or join one that already exists (there aren’t too many options at present, as the site just launched Wednesday). Rooms can be shared on Twitter or via email.

Once in the room, you can load up your VJ queue with videos — you can search for videos on YouTube or Vimeo within the site, or add a direct URL to any other online video. You then get up on the VJ stage and start spinning videos. Other users vote on whether they like your vids are not (thumbs up, or thumbs down), which garners you points. Right now, however, those points don’t score you cooler avatars, as on Turntable.fm. But those are coming soon, we gather.

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Just got this email:

When you sign up to Turntable.fm, the popular social music streaming service, one of four notification options is “Send me e-mails at random times with a different subsection of the digits of pi.” They’re not kidding.

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.

I don’t have the exact details, but from piecing together what I’ve learned from a few reputable folks/superusers:

After each boot from a room, users will now be banned from re-joining the room for a period of time

First boot: no ban

Second boot: 5 minute ban

Third boot: 1 hour ban

Fourth boot: 1 day ban

Additionally, if you are booted from multiple rooms, you are banned for 1 day

If you receive multiple 1 day bans, you can be flagged for review, with a possible perma-ban from the site as a result of human review of your activities.

Loving all the Turntable spin-off sites.

“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).

Not surprising that buzz has declined, considering when it first launched it was the hip new thing, and now even though it's still in "selective beta" I feel like most news sources have done their stories about it - no need to introduce it anymore.  Still, I plan to keep the turntable buzz going - and you can too by reblogging all things turntable, telling all your friends, and giving your own thoughts on TTFM!

Maura Johnston argues that turntable.fm is less about music discovery and more about playing well-known songs that will get you points and can serve as background music while you're doing other things.

I'm inclined to disagree.  Maybe that's the case in the rooms she's hanging out in, but what do you expect in a room like 90s Alternative?  Sure, you're bound to discover some older stuff you haven't heard before, but if you're in a room for a specific time period, chances are people went there to hear stuff they already know.  And that's fine.

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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This is so cool.

From their about section:

Turntable Battle (TTB) is a site that focuses on bridging physical venues (clubs, bars and festivals) and the virtual world on turntable.fm. 

We host multi-world events across the US and turntable.fm which pull music enthusiasts together into a memorable, interactive and fun experience. 

We elevate and extend the enthusiast’s experience by bringing  amazing DJs into both the venue and virtual world of turntable.fm, then we provide the venue with visuals that connect attendees to the virtual world. When both collide amazing experiences happen.

During our DJ Battles two different venues battle it out for epic supremacy. There the best compete for prizes while listeners hear the freshest and most innovative music from both chart topping artist and up-and-coming music producers and DJs.

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There are currently meetups for Seattle, NYC, Atlanta, Austin, LA, and San Francisco.  Apparently there are also meetups in the works for Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, New Orleans, Portland, San Jose, and Washington DC.  

Also, their website is integrated with tumblr so you can (and should) follow them - awesome!

The people who built Turntable.fm (some of whom might be in this video) have reason to celebrate. Their group-listening DJ party web app, Turntable.fm, has reportedly pulled down a $7.5 million investment round from New-York-City-based venture capital firm Union Square Ventures, valuing the company at nearly $40 million.

According to what "multiple sources" told Betabeat, Turntable.fm, known to have been looking for investment money (in no small part, we imagine, to pay for the cost of streaming the music it licenses, which comes from MediaNet and users' hard drives), is still finalizing paperwork on the deal, but it values the startup at $37.5 million.