Last night we had one of our biggest events in turntable history when the Australian house/dubstep duo Knife Party played a spontaneous show in #AnonFM. We had over 1,300 simultaneous users in the same room, almost double our previous record set by Passion Pit. It was crazy!
This was also coming off the heels of IceFest, an all-day music festival where 30 artists played new and unreleased songs for over 1,000 users over a 12 hour period.
Both of these events have one interesting feature in common - they weren’t organized by us. IceFest was a massive effort organized by Project AFM over the course of several months. And the Knife Party event was the result of a single text message from a user who happened to be friends with the band.
During most of 2012, our artist relations guy Jordan had been booking a few artist events a week, culminating in an epic 3-week-long Winter Festival. Our biggest takeaway from the Winter Festival was that artists visiting the site like to be a part of something bigger than themselves. And we decided that, going forward, we should try to integrate artist events with the larger turntable community.
So in 2013, we’ve made a conscious effort to mix artist events with user events, giving both equal weight and promotion. We’ve even been working with managers and labels to book artist events set in user-created rooms. For example, on Friday, the dubstep magicians Stephan Jacobs & NiT GriT will be playing a show in one of the site’s most popular rooms, DJ Wooooo’s.
We’ve also established a great flow of communication with our users. News of the spontaneous Knife Party event trickled upwards to the turntable staff within minutes, giving us ample time to promote the event to the greater turntable community and ensure that everything goes smoothly on the artist’s end as well.
We’re only a few weeks into 2013 but it’s already shaping up to be an awesome year for the turntable community. Virtual concerts are still a pretty new space and we’re always looking for new ideas from our users as to how we can help artists and fans engage with one another. If you have any ideas for cool events that you’d like to do on turntable, hit us up at communityevents@turntable.fm!
- Brad O’Farrell, Community Manager
I am so unbelievably excited and proud of our team for a year’s work in the making. It’s great to finally get this into people’s hands! For the last year, we have been building our second app to sit alongside turntable.fm.
The app is called piki and we are starting to open up our invite-only beta and let people in.
As our little company grows, we promise to continue building the most amazing social music experiences on the web (and mobile). Our new corporate website lives on turntable.com and highlights our first two apps.
Check out the video or read the Techcrunch article about piki and sign up for a beta request on piki.fm.
-billy chasen
We added a nice update to our UI today! The queue has been streamlined! Now when you search for songs, you’ll see songs from your queue first, then songs from the turntable library second. Also, you can upload songs by clicking the upload button or by dragging them from your desktop directly onto your queue! This update also brings improved performance for users with bigger queues, who were previously experiencing slow loading issues. We hope you guys like it!
I’m attending a friend’s wedding this summer – the first of anybody my age. Frankly, it’s freaking me out a bit; we all just turned twenty-four.
Frankly, weddings are about the one kind of event that Proximate really doesn’t get into. But with wedding season hitting full swing in the summer months, I figure I’d better pay attention to tech at weddings (if only to tide myself over until open bar).
There are some obvious ones – what is Pinterest without wedding ideas? – and portals like the Knot. But what about general-use tech than can solve some annoying parts of planning and running a wedding? I’ve got five ideas here.
[…]
DJs are really expensive for someone who’s essentially looping Sinatra, regrettable 80′s pop, and “The Electric Slide.” Luckily, there’s a lot out there if you choose Spotify or your streaming service of choice. Getting your guests in on the playlist-creation before the reception takes it off your already full to-do list. And, because I founded a company with Evan Morikawa, the day will come where I see a Turntable.FM wedding.
Interesting idea!
