Official blog

Turntable Live & turntable.fm

Turntable Live

For the last few months our team has been focused on building and launching Turntable Live, an interactive way to hold concerts online. We’ve done 11 events and so far everyone has really loved the experience.  To see what it looks like, check out this video or learn more at turntable.com. Our last performance with Nat & Alex Wolff raised $670 and had 170 people tune in from all over the world. You can watch a song from it here (along with our new gif feature).

With turntable.fm, one of our consistently well performing features has been bringing artists on and having people hang out and chat with them. Our largest event with Knife Party saw over 20,000 people (bigger than Madison Square Garden). It was pretty amazing and we saw a world of potential.

People started asking for more events. Artists wanted the ability to perform live. We saw there was a real desire for artists to reach more fans than normally possible with a regular live show.

So we started building Turntable Live. We did it for artists. They are relying more and more on live performances to offset dwindling record sales and small digital payouts. We did it for fans. We wanted to let fans connect with the bands they love and interact with them by asking questions, sending photos, and enjoying their performances.

turntable.fm

For over 2 years, we’ve improved and evolved the turntable.fm experience. We made rooms expand to unlimited sizes, made thousands of UI improvements, launched GOLD, built a mini-player, designed tons of avatars and listened to our community, trying to make the experience as wonderful as possible. Over those two years, the community has played over 400 million songs in about a million rooms.

As much as we all love turntable.fm, we have decided to shut it down to fully concentrate on the Live experience. It was a tough decision to make because we love this community so much, but the cost of running a music service has been too expensive and we can’t outpace it with our efforts to monetize it and cut costs. If we also want to give Turntable Live a real shot, we need to fully focus on it.

It’s hard news for all of us, but we want to at least go out in style. 

• First off, all your playlists and songs can be exported to Spotify or CSV by going here (Edit: As of Jan 15, 2014 we are no longer able to export playlist information).
• All the avatars we’ve designed are now accessible for everyone to enjoy.
• We have a special t-shirt to remember turntable.fm and it will be available for purchase next week.
• We are working on making anonymous raw data dumps for developers to have fun with.
• Finally, we will be organizing a last day party which will happen on turntable.fm on December 2.

Thanks for all the amazing times, songs played, conversations had, and people we met together!

<3 Team Turntable