Turntable.fm

» see turntable.fm as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

turntable.fm launched in may 2011 from new york. the founders were billy chasen and seth goldstein, with joseph perla running the tech. the product was a single screen. you walked into a virtual room organized by genre. up to five users at a time sat at dj booths in the front of the room. each dj queued a song from their personal library. the room listened together while everybody else voted "awesome" or "lame" on what was playing. enough lame votes and the song got skipped.

it caught fire fast. 140k users by late june, six weeks after public launch. over 600k by september 2011, with around a million songs streamed per day. people were holding "rooms" with their friends instead of group calls. office floors had a turntable room open all afternoon. it was the first time a streaming music site felt social in the way an irc channel felt social, where the room itself was the reason you logged on.

the catch was licensing. turntable ran on dmca provisions, which meant the entire site was geofenced to the united states. licensing got more expensive every quarter as labels figured out the loophole the company was riding. by 2012 turntable was paying more in royalties than it was raising in revenue. by late 2013 it was clear the model could not be saved. the site was switched off on december 2, 2013. a pivot to a live-concert platform called turntable live ran for less than two weeks before that also closed.

i never used turntable.fm. it was us-only at the licensing layer, which meant from turkey you got a region-blocked page or had to use a vpn to even see the site. by 2011 my music habits were watching tracks on youtube and tagging what i played on last.fm. the social-dj idea showed up about a decade later in twitch radio shows and discord listen-along channels, but the original room with five booths and a "lame" button never came back. in 2021 billy chasen launched a successor called deepcut.fm. it has not yet returned to the june 2011 numbers.

~ the case file ~

~ killed by ~

licensing math. the dmca rate per stream worked at small scale and broke at the scale turntable hit. the labels had no incentive to renegotiate because the loophole was already on a list of things the next congress would close. once labels started enforcing per-stream rates instead of looking the other way, the per-room economics turned negative. there was no version of the site that worked at full price.

~ what they invented ~

the synchronous music room. spotify and apple music were both library-and-shuffle products built around solo listening. turntable was the opposite. you were never alone in a room. every song was something somebody at a booth had picked specifically and was watching you react to. the avatars head-bobbed when the room voted a track up. that synchronous social shape did not exist in mainstream streaming before, and it has only partially come back since through twitch and discord.

~ what came after ~

the diaspora was small but loyal. plug.dj cloned the room interface in 2012 and ran in some form until 2017. jqbx tried it on top of spotify around 2017. discord listen-along arrived around 2018 as a feature inside an unrelated chat product. in 2021 billy chasen relaunched the brand as deepcut.fm and joseph perla launched turntable labs around the same time. neither one has the gravity the original june 2011 rooms had, when the site was the place you went to find out what your friends were actually listening to.

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