Things I’d like to see in Turntable.fm
First off, if you haven’t heard of Turntable.fm, what rock have you been hiding under? It’s the new killer music site started by Stickybits founders Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen. Basically you join a room, where up to five DJs are spinning their tracks for an audience, sometimes upwards of a few hundred people. It’s the ultimate in music discovery. Audience members can then vote for the songs that are being played.
Photo credit: TechCrunch
The service is only a few weeks old, but is already the bee’s knees. But seeing as how it’s just barely off the ground, there’s a ton of cool features that I’d love to see them add. Rather than sit on them, I thought I’d compile a list of the things that I’d love to see the most (and some criticisms). So here it goes:
Change “My DJ Queue to My Playlists: First off, queue is just a bit confusing. Sure it’s a queue of the songs that you’d like to play, but that’s commonly known as a “playlist” to most people. For mass adoption, calling it playlist may work better.
Multiple Playlists: Having only one playlist of songs can be crappy if you like to join many different rooms. I like to play all kinds of music. From Electro House to Dubstep to Rap to Metal. The reality is, if all of those songs were in the same playlist, I’m not sure that a Dubstep track would go over that well in a Metal room. Maybe unless it was the new Korn track.
“Get in line: One of the most annoying things is finding a room where 5 DJs hog the turntables. I’d love to be able to put my name on a list and when a DJ leaves their turntable, rather than having to constantly watch for when they drop off so I can snag the spot, it’d put me in automatically. This is similar to how all open mic nights are run.
DJs get a set number of songs: While starting a room, it’d be awesome if you could define how many tracks a DJ gets to play before they’re kicked off the tables. Hogging is really shitty as it doesn’t give the audience members a real chance to participate if they’d like.
Custom Avatars: One of the most annoying thing is having a DJ lineup where all the DJs seem to look the same. It’d be awesome to have a custom avatar builder where I’m able to make something that looks like me (or not at all). That way, the DJs are more recognizable when you roll into a room. After all, how recognizable would Daft Punk be without their iconic helmets?
Custom Rooms: Let’s face it, a dance club looks a little different than a rock bar. It’s be awesome if you could choose the “venue” when starting up a room. Something that looks like a house club would be a lot more convincing while playing some french house tracks. It’d be really cool to include branding as well, so that if a company like SimpleGeo is starting up a room, we’d be able to drape the logo everywhere.
SoundCloud/YouTube/HypeMachine Integration: Rather than relying on the library that Turntable has, it’d be great to pull in music from other music providers and drop in whatever you want. This would dramatically open up the amount of songs available to DJs.
Vote out the trolls: In some rooms that have gotten big, I’ve noticed some serious trolls in the chat making the experience not so fun. It’d be great if there was a voting mechanism where they weren’t able to chat in a room because of bad behavior.
Mobile App: This is a total no-brainer. How awesome would be it to tune in while on the go? The other cool second order effect from this would be plugging in a set of speakers to a computer or phone and then letting the audience of a party join up as a DJ to play some tracks. This would make bars, parties, etc. pretty killer.
Change settings of the room after it’s created: One of the most annoying things is that after a room is created, the settings can’t be changed. This includes limiting the number of DJs, name changes, etc. It’d be great if the person that created the room, or a moderator could do this.
Well that’s it. What else did I miss?
