Turntable.fm founders Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen sat down with TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about the rise of Turntable.fm from the ashes of Stickybits, among other things. “It was less of a pivot and more of a restart,” Chasen said, on why he decided to dump the team’s original intent of making random barcode scanning a ubiquitous behavior in order to focus on the more promising Turntable.
“One day Billy came to me and said hey I’ve got this idea for a chat room with avatars and music and I said, ‘Hey that’s genius.'” Goldstein recounted. Fast forward from Turntable’s launch (via a single tweet on May 19th) to today, when the service is hitting a million songs streamed a day, with over 600K users, more than 300K rooms and 25 million songs “awesomed.”
“This taps into something pretty deep, people want to experience music together,” Goldstein tried to explain the app’s success. “The expectations were pretty low, and then when it hit it hit pretty obviously and it grew really organically. Our biggest challenge now is [scaling] the extent to which we have great coverage in the SF, NY and LA in music digital hipster indie community … How do we do we crossover to college campuses and really across the country to become a broader mass market consumer experience without losing this incredible passionate hard-core user base?”
The pair wakes tomorrow morning ready to face this challenge, with a cool $7 million in their pocket and a snazzy new iPhone app in the App Store.