Top 5 Reasons Turntable.fm is Really Cool!

A few months ago, my buddy Flinchbot showed me this site, Turntable.fm where you can go into a virtual theme club with other music fans and listen to music together, either by listening in the crowd or jumping up on stage behind a laptop or iPhone and selecting individual songs from an on-line library or uploading your own mp3s. With it's lovable avatars and appealing interface and interactivity, Turntable.fm quickly became my new internet addiction. Here's a Top 5 list of reasons why Turntable.fm is really cool.


5) There is a Room For Every Music Genre

The Lobby.

As soon as you enter Turntable.fm through Facebook, you arrive in the lobby where a chart shows you a list of rooms and how many listeners are gathered inside each one. As you can see from the pic above, there's everything from ambient trip hop to dubstep to rock and roll and classical. There's basically a room for any type of music style and if there isn't one, you can create one. Just click on a room to enter and you'll be sent to a virtual room where you are a part of the listening audience. If there is a DJ spot available, just hop up and play a song when your turn comes up.


4) The Avatars

Starting avatars.

When you start off, you are only allowed to choose from some basic avatars and when you play a song that someone likes, you get a DJ point. Get enough DJ points and you can unlock special avatars to represent your Turntable.fm presence. Starter avatars include some basic human characters. As you collect more DJ points you can become a pin-cushion or possessed teddy bear, or a green cat, or bug-eyed caped creeps, until you eventually get to unlock a blinged out gorilla or a monkey with glasses wearing a fez. If you participate long enough, you can unlock special astronauts/spacemen at 10,000 DJ points. 


3) You can vote whether a song is Awesome or Lame.

The awesome/lame meter.

If a song comes on that you like, you can express this by clicking on the Awesome button, which causes your avatar to bob it's head to the music and reward a DJ point to the user playing the song. It's a great feeling when you have a room full of avatars bobbing their heads to a song that you chose to play. On the other hand, if a song comes on that you simply hate or consider over-played, you can click on the Lame button. If enough users in the room click on the Lame button, the song gets skipped. In some circumstances, if the DJ continuously gets lamed, they get booted from the stage.

2) Music Artists and Bands can play their music to a virtual audience.

Shimmercore playing a song from his latest album, Dronelands to a large gathering.

Turntable.fm is a great medium to hear and share new music and it's a great tool to play original songs that you've recorded to a captive audience and get a feel how the community views your music. Be careful not to just play your own music constantly or TT.fm users will know that you are just spamming and lame you. Everyone has their way of promoting their own music. Just be sure to balance your DJ queue with similar sounding songs to your music style to maximize receiving the most DJ points on your turn. If TT.fm users enjoy your songs, they can become fans and will be notified through email when you DJ again at a later date.


1) You can discover music you've never heard before from actual people instead of an algorithm.

The chat box allows you to interact with the users in the room.

Instead of letting Pandora or Spotify pick songs for you based on some fuzzy algorithm, the DJs of Turntable.fm want to gain more DJ points by playing what they consider the best songs for the room at the current moment. You will more than likely hear something you enjoy from actual users playing the hits from the room specified genre or obscure songs from a forgotten album to new releases from the past week and unreleased promos. The chat box is great to interact with the users of the room about the music you are hearing or playing. Often times, themes can occur organically where DJs start playing songs that reference a commonality.

Punk rocking possessed teddy bear DJs.

If you're still unsure what Turntable.fm is all about, then sign in and explore what it can do for you and how it can enhance your music discovering experience. Who knows? you may be the next Turntable.fm DJ Star!


- Mike

The author's Turntable.fm avatar.