The appeal of social music platform Turntable.fm has been its synchronous music listening in public dance rooms. Anyone can become the MC, playing the tunes and playlists of their choice, just as each listener can choose their own avatar, or chat with other music junkies in realtime. And now tech and startup geeks have a new feature to get excited about: Turntable quietly announced via blog post today that users can add stickers from their startup of choice to their laptops while dropping those mad ill beats. → Read More
From the outset, the biggest appeal of social music platform Turntable.fm has been its synchronous listening in public rooms where anyone can become the dee-jay. Of course, turn back the clock six months, and Turntable probably didn’t see Facebook as a competitor. However, at f8 the social network launched Turntable-inspired synchronous listening and chat and went public with some big partnerships with the likes of Spotify and Rdio. At the time, Turntable could only grin and say “thank you,” but now the startup can reply with some big guns of its own, as it announced deals with the “Big Four” record labels — Sony BMG, Universal, EMI, and Warner — at SXSW today. → Read More
Regardless of where you stand on the SOPA battle, you’ve got to agree: seeing what seems to be the entire Internet come together to stand against something is incredible. Each company has a different approach, but their goal is the same: make sure everyone goes to sleep knowing what SOPA is.
While I don’t want to turn today’s protests into a who-did-it-best battle (that’s not at all the point), I’ve got to highlight Turntable.fm’s approach. It’s about as simple as could be, but it just oozes with symbolism. → Read More
“I’m flattered Facebook was inspired by turntable.fm and created a listen together feature” says co-founder Billy Chasen about Facebook’s new synchronous music listening and chat feature Listen With. Chasen tells me “I look forward to seeing how they interpret what social music means as we seem to have different core philosophies about it (such as the importance of discovering new music from strangers and not just friends).” Chasen seems to think that only listening to what your friends enjoy won’t provide discovery as adventurous as Turntable.fm’s public rooms. → Read More
The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.
For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App (Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline, the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0), the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like Task Rabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.
In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can. → Read More
As open nominations for the 5th annual Crunchies awards enters its final week (nominate here until Dec 13), it’s time to figure out which are the best startups and products of 2011. The Crunchies, which we co-host along with GigaOm and VentureBeat, has 20 categories spanning but the most anticipated awards, the ones we save for last, are Best Overall Startup and Best New Startup of 2011.
Last year, Twitter won Best Overall and Quora won Best New Startup. Who will win this year? There are plenty of amazing startups to choose from. In the Best Overall category strong contenders include Airbnb, Dropbox and Square. Best New Startup is a tougher category. Some names to think about here include Pinterest, Turntable.fm, Nest, Codecademy, Getaround, and Warby Parker. Who do you think deserves to be named the best startup of the year? Nominate them on the Crunchies voting site and make your case in the comments below. → Read More
For the past few months, few things on the web have been hotter than Turntable.fm. The Stickybits pivot got so hot, so fast, that a “trough of disillusionment” was inevitable — and we’ve probably been seeing that the past couple of weeks. But something is coming very shortly that should supercharge the service once again: an iPhone app.
Yes, it was both obvious and inevitable that Turntable.fm would go mobile. But we’ve managed to obtain some details — and most importantly, screenshots. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Seth Goldstein, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — sat in awe of Apple’s massive hammerlock on the tablet market. What the New York Times called 97% of the purchased category became crystal clear as HP folded its cards and went home to an uncertain future. @seth, founder of the viral music startup turntable.fm, seemed as thrilled with Spotify as he was with his own service. A complementary handoff from discovery to living in the new groove, with a tablet product on the way to supplement third party placeholders.
The session had a soft rhythm of exploration and dumbfounded amazement at what HP and RIM and Nokia were thinking when they jumped in with tablets for the remaining 3%. Did they have to try at least once before abandoning the PC, or play off the remaining 3 or 4 years on enterprise contracts, or believe in Windows Phone and Android activations? It would be laughable if real money weren’t involved, but instead these companies will have to turn to the record companies of all people for clues about how to finally make a transition into the Cloud. Or as @scobleizer pronounced it, iCloud. → Read More
Have you noticed an uptick in the number of Tweets that mention Spotify, Turntable.fm or other music services lately? It’s all part of their diabolical plans. Online music services live or die by word of mouth, which is why most of them have hooks into Twitter and Facebook for users to share invites and the songs they are listening to. But which ones are winning the battle of the music tweets?
Social media analytics company Simply Measured looked at a one week sample of tweets linking to one of three music services: Spotify, Turntable.fm, and Pandora. → Read More
One of the most prolific vinyl collections belongs to a DJ who only surfaces every now and then. And when he does, legions of fans wait on baited breath, desperate to taste the latest brew from Josh Davis, otherwise known as DJ Shadow. DJs like Shadow usually begin creating underground. Their music is the result of months of sampling and cutting to form entirely new sounds. These new tunes form in darkness, outside the purview of record labels, radio stations, and the majority of listeners. It’s a bit romanticized, but there’s also much truth to the underground creative process and secretive DJ battles that occur in real life, where other DJs rate their peers. For those who have witnessed a live battle, it’s a unique environment where an unknown DJ can conceivably, on any given night, spin records better than pros like DJ Shadow.
Yes, this is another post about Turntable.fm.
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Although many investors are spinning for the chance to invest in Turntable.fm, the hot music startup has not yet picked a dance partner, despite reports to the contrary. Business Insider claims that Turntable has raised $7.5 million at a $37.5 million valuation and “that term sheets were indeed signed yesterday.” But reached a few hours ago as he was boarding a plane, co-founder and chairman Seth Goldstein told me, “We have not closed any new financing.”
There is certainly a lot of interest in Turntable from VCs who want to fund its next round. The buzz among venture investors is that there is intense competition for the deal, particularly between Union Square’s Fred Wilson, Accel, and Kleiner Perkins. Wilson is the clear favorite (Turntable is based in New York City), but he is being outbid by Accel and Kleiner. → Read More
Signing up for Twitter at South by Southwest 2007, I can remember those feelings of “Wow, this is going to be big.” That instant feeling of knowing you’re seeing the future and the world doesn’t even have a clue yet. It’d be years before my friends would finally take the leap and get their own Twitter accounts (even if I knew Twitter usernames in 2007 were like domain names in 1995).
There have been other services I’ve thought would be big, but only one other time in the past four years have I been awe-struck. That other moment was earlier this year (SXSW 2011) when Foursquare unveiled v3 with the “Explore” functionality—I knew that was a life-changer. I’ve dug Foursquare since the early days, but this third version is where it became obvious that every person in the world would benefit from using this service.
The third magical “wow” moment just happened this week, and it’s Turntable.fm. The early adopting tech elites are eating this site up, just as they did Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, and others. Barring some awful interference, this app is going to break big and change things. → Read More
Ever wonder how super angel and man-about-town Chris Sacca spends his Friday nights? Well, right now you can find him at Turntable.fm, a stealthy, you-can-only-get-in-if-you-know-someone online DJ party. I just stumbled onto it by accident. You can only gain entry if you are Facebook friends with someone already inside.
As it happens, I knew some people. Turntable.fm is a project of Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen, the two guys who brought us Stickybits. You enter and there are different DJ rooms to choose from. There are probably 25 people there right now (this is still in private alpha). But in one room called “Let’s rock old-ish hip-hop,” there was Sacca, Goldstein, YouTube’s Hunter Walk, and Mike Marquez of CODE Advisors. Sacca was playing “Push It” by Salt-n-Pepa, up on the DJ platform (he gets to wear the space helmet because he has a lot of points, which are awarded to him by other people in the room who like what he plays). → Read More
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