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Turntable dunked all other music streaming sites in playlist quality for the simple reason that the intelligence behind song selection resided in humans rather
by tks2103 13y ago
Turntable dunked all other music streaming sites in playlist quality for the simple reason that the intelligence behind song selection resided in humans rather than an algorithm.
It was a specific application of the general idea that social recommendations are more powerful than algorithmic recommendations. I don't know how valid the general idea is, but when it came to Turntable, it worked. People search the space of musical works much more effectively than algorithms.
And then Turntable did nothing with that power. They had high quality playlists being minted by the thousands on a daily basis, and I could not access any of them.
At least for a time, they were focused on live engagement. Unfortunately, it's just too hard to grow a music streaming product that demands each listener be present to click a button for every song. I loved the service, but I also have a job. I cannot be on the site all day long. At the risk of being presumptuous, I would guess that the product leaders were blinded by their devotion to live engagement.
Focusing instead on their brilliant, yet simple, solution to the problem of "What song should go on next?" would have been the right call. But they did not walk this path.
As for their new product, which predictably focuses more intently on the live engagement aspect, I am unconvinced. Turntable Live provides a subset of the functionality that Twitch.tv does, with less reach.
Best of luck to them. No doubt, they are an extremely talented team.
And I'm really, really going to miss Turntable. Kickass idea. (yeah yeah plug.dj, whatever)
- bspace 13y agoGlad to see plug.dj exists. I mean, I did work really hard at accumulating my awesome avatar collection on turntable.fm, but I think I'll get over the loss as long as there's somewhere new to go.
- livejamie 13y agoAre you familiar with Songza?
- tks2103 13y agoyeah good service to point out. the playlists on turntable were an organic composition of the community in the channel. the user was directly involved in the creation process. the playlist changed to reflect the people in the channel. it was an entirely social gathering (when it started anyway), as if you got 50 music heads into a room and asked them to rock out. songza is purely curated. for that reason, it misses the social aspect. songza is more like hiring an extremely inexpensive dj. other users dont get to interact with the playlist content. different approaches to the same problem, but i believe the real innovation is in combining humans minds and experiences in searching the song graph. songza does not do that. turntable did. songza still cool tho!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wanderr 13y agoFWIW, Grooveshark has a feature called Broadcast that, while not the same thing as Turntable, has the human curated music selection part of the experience. We're also about to release functionality that lets you view past broadcasts, hopefully addressing your main complaint. :) http://grooveshark.com/#!/broadcasts http://grooveshark.com/#!/broadcasts Full disclosure: I work there!