Dope Producer Showcase III is going down in ONE HOUR! Ta-ku, Elaquent, Bahwee, and more will be kicking it throughout the night.
Get there now for the opening acts!
Notice some new things on turntable.fm today? Well, you’re not going crazy— we did make some sweet changes.
Starting today, you can do lots of new things in the rooms.
First, we added a brand new zoom feature in all the rooms. Feel free to now get up close and personal with the DJs or catch a whole party from the back of the room.
Second, you can now pick a song right from turntable.fm! Look for the purple piki.fm logo in the song board.
Try these out now! We hope you’ll like these updates as much as we do.
NEW YORK—(BUSINESS WIRE) — April 1, 2013 — Turntable.fm, Inc. today announced that it has created a revolutionary new advertising service. Turntable Contextual Gifvertising™ is a dynamic and engaging new way for advertisers to reach consumers.
“The turntable community has always been passionate about gifs” said Jonathan Kupferman, Turntable Head of Gifvertising Operations. “Now with Contextual Gifvertising™ we can help bridge the gap between what our community wants and what advertisers can deliver. It’s an entirely new way for brands to connect with their audience.”
Starting today, when a user enters a turntable room they will see highly targeted gifs related to the conversations that they are already having. For example, when users talk about “doing the dougie” they may see a sponsored instructional gif from Kate Upton. While discussing swimming lessons they may be presented with a corgi in a branded life vest. This form of advertising, like the discussion taking place, is lively and captivating. Extensive testing has shown that users prefer ads with kitten gifs over text ads 93.4% of the time.
Using a unique combination of technology and intellectual property, Turntable has developed the next generation of advertising. “When we first started working on Gifvertising people thought it was a joke,” said Turntable VP of Engineering Cailin Nelson. “After months of intense research we developed a comprehensive GIFID™ system that allows us to deliver the right ad, at the right time, to the right user. While it took a tremendous amount of effort, the results speak for themselves.”
“We used to just run text ads on Google to get traffic to our online flower shop,” said Susan Faith, owner of Contoso Flowers. “When we changed to Turntable Contextual Gifvertising™ and started using the ‘sloth gives a girl a flower’ gif, our traffic has gone through the roof. We’re really excited about the future of Gifvertising and its impact on our business.”
Turntable Chairman Seth Goldstein commented “From the moment I first saw the dancing baby, I knew that gifs could be a game-changer. But ‘under construction’ and ‘begging cat’ were only the beginning of gif technology. We’re ready to take gifs from 2.0 to 3.0.”
Turntable Contextual Gifvertising™ is available on turntable.fm starting today. Advertisers who are interested in participating in the program should contact gifvertising@turntable.fm to receive a quote.
Join us in http://turntable.fm/gifvertising at 2 PM EST on 4/1 for the launch party.
Tuesday was our first office-wide Hackday at Turntable. Our frontend developer Dan decided to mine our database for data about how songs spread between users. Here are his findings:
Happy (belated) V-day, turntablers! I’m Dan, a TT developer, and in honor of this day of love, I’d love to tell you about a project I’ve been working on for Turntable’s inaugural internal “hack day”.
Unless you’ve been living under a digital rock, you know and love this little “valentine” that floats through the room every time someone adds the currently-playing song to their own queue. Snag! Gank! Yoink! Heart fart! Whatever you like to call ‘em, there’s no doubt that they make up a large part of our culture on turntable. Sometimes you hear a song that’s just so dang good, you want to shout it from the mountaintops, to walk out on the street, boom box in hand, so the rest of the world can understand just how awesome this song is. It is for these moments that the almighty snag was invented.
When a new song is played on turntable, it’s often snagged by many people who go forth into other rooms and play it for their friends. Some of these friends may love it enough to snag it themselves and share it with their friends, and the cycle continues! I’ve always found this to be a fascinating part of our community, and have often wondered how far my own favorite songs have spread through the TT universe. So this week, I decided to find out.
Ever since the day the “snagging” was introduced as a new feature on turntable, Jon (who draws cats) set up our servers to keep track of which songs were snagged by whom, and from whom, and stick this bit of info in a collection in our database. Then we didn’t touch that collection for a long time. So imagine my excitement to poke my head in there yesterday and find an untouched goldmine of nearly 8 million snags collected over the past year and a half! I immediately set to work writing a script to sort these out and generate something visual to show how songs propagated through the community. After a (hack) day’s work tweaking data and playing with d3 I was able to generate this lovely tree, which shows all snags for the song “At The River” by Groove Armada, one of my all-time faves:
At The River
Reading the chart, like reading the rings on a tree stump, requires a bit of explanation: The cluster of green dots in the middle represent a song’s “primary sources” – that is, people who added the song to their queue on their own, either by uploading it or searching for it in our library. Each grey line is a snag from another user, represented by the yellow dot at the other end of the line. As they play the song for more people, the “snaggers” become “snaggees”, adding another layer to the tree and spreading the music out to more people! I’m quite proud of this particular tree myself – as you can see, after I snagged the song from “Zound” (halfway up from the middle) I was able to share it with many more people.
Last night Knife Party was in #AnonFM and they had 1528 simultaneous listeners, breaking the site-wide record for the most users in a single room at a time. The previous record was 1343 users, and was also set by Knife Party in #AnonFM! The image above (provided by #AnonFM) shows how those events stack up against a typical “big” event which tends to cap out at around 700.
The Knife Party show was completely unexpected and the turntable team snapped into action to make sure everything was set up for the event in minutes. The ensuing show was massive. Just as our traffic normally trails off for the night, we had a huge bump:
It was a fun night!
If you want to do an event on turntable, send an email to communityevents@turntable.fm and we’ll help get you set up right!
Whoa! Check out all this awesome turntable fan art! There’s a bunch more under the #DJ Heroes tag, which was apparently started by yessu! We approve of this so hard! If you wanna participate, draw your avatar as a super hero and tag it with #DJ Heroes!
On Friday we added the playlist feature to turntable.fm and we’re already starting to see some interesting data about how people organize their music. Here’s the top 50 most common playlist names, in order:
Any surprises? I wouldn’t expect to see “disney” and “troll” so high on the list above “punk”! We also merged “90’s” and “90s” into one category. In case you’re wondering, “90s” is twice as popular as “90’s” and “80s” is only 50% more popular than “80’s”!
This data is only 4 days old, but it’s still pretty interesting! Would you guys like to see more posts like this in the future?
