Turntable.fm is shutting down December 3

[Furik 832]

Turntable.fm will shut down next month after nearly two years of operation. Turntable says that the decision to shut down its social music service was a tough one, but that it wants to begin focusing all of its efforts on Turntable Live, a new site that invites artists to stream live concerts to fans. Though Turntable.fm seemed to have some cult following, it appears music licensing costs finally became too much to handle. "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," Turntable writes.

 

The service's final day of operation will be December 2nd, when Turntable promises to throw one final party. "If we also want to give Turntable Live a real shot, we need to fully focus on it," Turntable writes. So far, it's happy with the response. The streaming shows — all of which are hosted from Turntable's SoHo studio — try to recreate the live concert experience, straight down to asking fans to buy tickets ahead of time. Eleven shows have been run so far, with the last one bringing in $670 from 170 total viewers. While recreating the feel of a concert may be an exciting goal, Turntable.fm's users will likely be upset over losing the charm of being a digital DJ.

 

Source: The Verge

[Champ213 1858]

With they way things were going recently, I was kinda expecting this. I haven't been there ever since they removed the ability to upload your own songs though.

 

 

Still sad. It was a great place during its prime and I discovered a lot of new music. But then they had to start blocking songs for copyright and presumably had to pay a lot of fees for their catalogue of licenced music.  From what I heard the site never really was making a profit.

 

 

It's messed up. I'm all in favour of supporting artists by buying as much of their music as I can, but if I want to play some songs from my computer to a bunch of friends, I don't see why somebody has to be charged for that. =/

 

R.I.P. TT

[sai 868]

Sad to see TT go. It was a pain in the ass to get on when not from the US, which I think was always one of their biggest weaknesses. They've been saying for two years they were working on making it accessible for every one, but I guess that just never happened. I think they sort of started going downhill when they forced people to use SoundCloud. Then again, it's quite possible they did that because uploading of all the songs resulted in a lot of license costs from all sorts of record companies for them. Using SoundCloud as an external source would solve most of this problem.

 

Afaik TT was non-profit, so having to pay actual licences for the music in their catalogue is probably what did them under. Like Champ, I find it ridiculous that someone needs to pay an amount of money to play a song in front of your friends. That would be the same that if I bought an album irl and invited my friend over to come listen to it, I'd have to pay the record company a fee to let my friend listen to the album I purchased. I guess you don't really purchase music anymore? You just sort of...rent it?

 

I guess with all this current copyright asshattery it's really hard to share/enjoy your music with your friends/others (downloads, okay, but I would think playing the songs in front of your friends is pretty harmless).

[Champ213 1858]

Pretty much any restriction they had to impose was because of copyright&royalty laws. I remember when they originally started, there were no restrictions at all. You could upload anything and entry wasn't restricted to the US. And I'm pretty sure TT would have kept it that way, but then the music industry decided that the service was more akin to a radio station and that they had to pay royalty fees like any radio station.

 

Obviously you are allowed to invite some friends to your home and listen with them to music together.  But if you were taking money for it, or the event was kinda public (ie. with other random people able to join), you would have to pay royalties. Granted, you could argue that rooms that allowed for up to 200 listeners is more than just "a few friends", but neither TT nor the users playing the music made any profit from it. I think as long as you are not making any money from playing music to others, it shouldn't be charged at all. I don't see how it would be hurting record sales. It's not like people are thinking "Oh hey, I won't need to buy that CD, because I can hear the songs on TT every once in a blue moon". It's ridicolous.

 

So yeah, copyright laws killed another great music service.