Two Days In, and I’m Already Addicted to Turntable.fm
I have been hearing a lot of great things about this new music startup, and decided to give it a try yesterday morning. It’s the following morning at the time of writing this, and I’m officially hooked.
Turntable.fm is a new social music startup that lets friends and complete strangers share their favorite music with each other. The web app allows users to join or create listening rooms, where there are DJs who can step up to the plate and curate the music in the room by adding songs to their personal queues. Listeners and DJs in the room can rate the song “Lame” or “Awesome” and the DJ receives points (or gets skipped) depending on the ratings that his songs get.
Right now, the service is still in private beta. The only way you can join up is by signing in with your Facebook account, but the catch is that one of your current Facebook friends must have already signed up, otherwise you can’t use the service. I guess I lucked out, because I gave it a random shot and it worked! Thanks, faceless Facebook friend…
My Experience
I was in a room called “Morning Becomes Eclectic” all day yesterday, and I had a blast. There is a chat function, so you can interact with the other people in the room that way. There are no official rules that can be set in rooms yet, but we all joined together and decided that the fairest way to take turns was to spin three songs and let a new DJ jump up and show off. It was really awesome to see all of these random strangers working together to create an awesome (and democratic) music playlist for the day.
Recently blocked in all non-US territories
Just last week, the service was forced to block all non-US territories. It is times like these that I am grateful to be living in the United States. I really hope the international record label execs will wake up and realize the incredible opportunities that can arise from supporting a social music experience like Turntable.fm.
