Turntable.fm may turn out to have pulled the most epic Odeo since Twitter. Despite serious problems with stability, the service has practically erupted in users with average engagement times that surely beat out even Facebook. I'm not going to bother typing up a description of the service as it is ably described here at Signal News, and I'm thinking of writing a more in depth analysis of their engagement mechanics (based on Amy Jo Kim's Smart Gamification patterns), but here is a brain dump:
- As my friend Todd Siegel pointed out, at a basic level SecondLife has been offering something similar for years. In fact they go one better by being optimized for presenting actual live performances and not just playing mp3s and they offer better avatars and servers that stay running. Why didn't SecondLife hit the same engagement lottery payoff? This is an obvious lesson in keeping it simple and focused. SecondLife is far too complex and although you could pull off the tt.fm experience easily in that environment it would
- be harder for listeners to discover "rooms" and learn how to use their more expressive and customizable but more complicated avatars.
- require an external system for managing the audio stream, as uploading audio files to SecondLife is costly, but it is cheap/free to play a stream hosted at an external source.
- The Record Labels: Obviously the tt.fm team has tried to address their concerns by adding things like the inability to hear songs you are playing unless there is at least one other DJ on the stand. So although you can upload music, and add the music that others have uploaded to your playlist, you can't just go and treat it as your personal jukebox. You have to collaboratively be creating a de facto Internet radio station. So hopefully this lets them use the same terms as sites such as Pandora or Last.FM. The RIAA does not have a good track record for being smart, but they should really wake up to the opportunity here. I've not only bought music already that I discovered at tt.fm, but I've even bought tracks in iTunes just to add them to my tt.fm playlist! This is the most engaging music offering I've seen since Napster, and unlike Napster this one has clear ways for the RIAA to get their fair share of the pie. Heck the user song-engagement data they are collecting alone should be of great value to the record labels (think along the lines of what Chris Sacca descrbes about Twitter in his Kevin Rose interview).
- The Wishlist, aka Things I Would Have Probably Spent Tens of Dollars On Already If Available:
- Purchase DJ points, so people won't resort to things like AutoBop and the like.
- Multiple Playlists. Nothing is more embarrassing than not noticing that you've run through all your punk songs at the top of the queue and push into the psy-trance territory.
- Custom Avatars. I should be able to upload my own PNGs. Oh what I would have paid for that already.
- Room options that can be set by the moderator(s) such as genre (enforceable by id3 tags), a queue for lining up to take open DJ spots, number of songs per DJ before they have to step down (maybe a function of how many DJs in the audience are queued up).
- Plugin API for writing bots for specific rooms. For example, I hang out sometimes in a room where we invented a game (I call it Turn Robin). The rule is that when you play a song, it has to contain at least one word that was in the last song played. This is fun since whn you are the next DJ in the round-robin queue then you have a limited amount of time (the length of the song currently playing) to find a match so there is some pressure to perform, the resulting song mix is wonderfully eclectic and there have been some great transitions. It would be nice if we could just code a bot to run as the room moderator and enforce the rules by doing string comparison on the successive tracks. If a DJ fails they would get forced to give up their spot (and next DJ in audience queue could jump in to play perhaps).
- It would be nice to have an HTTP API as well so we could have things like:
-
- Growl integration
- Desktop app to let us participate outside of the browser (which would help restore productivity in many offices). I'd like to see the current song/dj up in my OS X status bar, for example, with the Awesome/Lame buttons always available there.
- Mobile app! I sometimes put turntable.fm on the tv/stereo in my living room. It would be nice to not have to get up and go to the MacMini connected to the TV in order to participate, I (and my guests on their own phones) should be able to do it from across the room.
- A turntable.fm screensaver that mixes with Last.FM to show current artist photos, etc (actually I just want that for Last.FM stations even).
- Audio level normalization. This comes up more often in the old school punk rooms, but a lot of tracks for whatever reason are mastered at a lower volume. I'm no audio nerd, but this seems like a technical problem that can automagically be fixed.
- The interface should let you know if a track in your playlist has been played in the room recently (or the same artist even).
- Beat analysis so the head bopping is actually in time with the music :)
- Stats and Data. I'd like to know which songs in my playlist have been Awesomed the most (in this room, across the site), which songs/artists have been played the most in this room, what songs that I've awesomed that I don't have in iTunes (i.e, a purchase list). Which songs my friends have awesomed lately. All kinds of things. At least one meta site heading in this direction (ttdashboard.com) has already popped up, but I'd like to see more of this enabled either through an official API or through new official features.
- Google+ association, so my music loving friends that refuse to join Facebook can come play.
- LinkedIn association, which then lets you have rooms restricted to employees of a certain company.
- A shrinking of the interface in crowded rooms so you can focus on communicating just with your friends. I picture this as a slight clearing in the crowd of avatars where all your friends's avatars are gathered together (right now everyone is just randomly placed in the space), and perhaps in the chat interface a highlighting of comments from your friends or even the ability to filter out all the other chat messages.
- In fact, it would be nice if you could move around the room yourself. Maybe upload custom dance moves and head bops.
- NYConvergence has reported that tt.fm has passed over 300,000 users. I'm not sure where they sourced this information, but doing some URL hacking at ttdashboard.com it seems the highest user number currently is 116398, which is roughly in the same ballpark and quite impressive for something so recently launched and still restricting signups. The ttdashboard site probably has some lag in collecting new users, and has probably missed some in their scrapings as I imagine they wont find users who hang out only in private rooms.
- As I mentioned above, I'd like to do an in-depth analysis of their engagement mechanisms because despite being the most engaging new app I've seen in quite some time, I feel like they are barely scratching the surface of what is available to them. With their freshly dropped $7.5M of funding they will surely be pushing forward in this regard soon.
Turntable.FM's vision and execution as been amazing, but I think there is plenty of room in the space for other options. Maybe not to the level of the GroupOn copycat phenomenon, but I can easily see speciality sites with similar offerings for various genres, social groups, etc. In fact I would be suprised if someone isn't working on replicating this in SecondLife right now. Conversely I can see tt.fm eventually offering streaming live music over the tubes, which was previously a SecondLife forté. I'm looking forward to the bounty of innovation tt.fm inspires, because I haven't been this excited about the music scene in years. I've reconnected with a lot of old music buddies because of this service, people I haven't interacted with in a decade or more, and it's been great. Hope to see you out there, I'm @dav on turntable.fm.
great article, dav.
Obviously I'm addicted...and look forward to improvements...esp. the DJ queue and hopefully limiting number of songs as part of room set up (and the ability to change both along with room title if you change your mind)
Also want to be able to set up a list of favorite rooms...currently just adding them to my "where you'll find me" as part of my profile...since you'd have to search for the name if nobody you've 'fanned' is in there. Also need to have a list of my fans and ppl I've fanned.
A group of ppl from the old VOX days have also set up a game room similar to yours...where the next song has to associate somehow with the song before it. Another room randomly picks different themes..whether genre/musical instrument/whatever. Def. keeps you on your toes.
I've been using a Chrome extension playlist manager until they hopefully work something out. And another for scrobbling.
Not sure if I have been missing it or it just popped up but there's an FAQ now(?)...
See you out there!
-D
Posted by: Dave Brown | 2011.07.09 at 09:33 AM
Ah cool, good points! I hadn't checked out any Chrome extensions yet, will look into that. And no I hadn't seen an FAQ yet, but just noticed it after you pointed it out. A lot of good info in there, such as "the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) says that we cannot play more than three songs from one album or four songs from one artist in a three hour period." For the most part it seems like social constructs have been enforcing that but I guess they must have some algorithm enforcements in place as well.
Great seeing you on there, you're one of my reconnected friends!
Posted by: dav | 2011.07.09 at 10:04 AM
Word!
I do wish (and I tweeted to them with no response) they'd have included an explanation of the yellow and pink highlighted songs. I assume it has something to do with DMCA stuff...but i haven't been able to figure it out exactly.
-D
Posted by: Dave Brown | 2011.07.09 at 11:25 AM