Ever wonder how super angel and man-about-town Chris Sacca spends his Friday nights? Well, right now you can find him at Turntable.fm, a stealthy, you-can-only-get-in-if-you-know-someone online DJ party. I just stumbled onto it by accident. You can only gain entry if you are Facebook friends with someone already inside.
As it happens, I knew some people. Turntable.fm is a project of Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen, the two guys who brought us Stickybits. You enter and there are different DJ rooms to choose from. There are probably 25 people there right now (this is still in private alpha). But in one room called “Let’s rock old-ish hip-hop,” there was Sacca, Goldstein, YouTube’s Hunter Walk, and Mike Marquez of CODE Advisors. Sacca was playing “Push It” by Salt-n-Pepa, up on the DJ platform (he gets to wear the space helmet because he has a lot of points, which are awarded to him by other people in the room who like what he plays).
Everyone in a room has an avatar and can chat with each other. You can create your own playliist and get up on the DJ table to battle it out. People tend to talk a lot of smack. But it’s fun, and addictive enough that I didn’t leave after 20 seconds. Turntable.fm needs a lot of fine-tuning (in fact a lot of the chat was about features it coud use, such as better animations for the avatars or different ways to award points.
In the end, Turntable.fm is really about hanging out with people and discovering music. If a DJ is playing a song you like, you can add it to your playlist, buy it on iTunes, findi it on Last.fm, or launch Spotify.
What’s a surefire sign that a web service has hit the big time? Well, when the celebrities start to pile on of course!
The guys behind GiantThinkwell and the Mixnmatch game have teamed up with the Grammy award winning producer, emcee and lover of the natural female form Sir Mix-Alot for a rare Turntable.fm performance celebrating the game’s launch.
“We’re huge fans of turntable.fm.,” says GiantThinkwell co-founder Adam Tratt. “In fact, we’re Cameron-Diaz-in-Vanilla-Sky crazy for it. (We <3 you, @seth & @billychasen.) Having Mix host a set in Turntable would be slick, but having Mix as a skinny white guy with a faux-hawk simply wouldn’t do. With our release on the way out the door and the sun rising in Seattle, we set our plan in motion: to get Sir Mix-A-Lot hosting a Turntable.fm room… with a custom Sir Mix-A-Lot avatar.”
In order to create a custom Sir Mix-A-Lot avatar, Tratt creatively rigged a custom piece of Javascript to transform the ubiquitous Turntable.fm icons into the spitting avatar image of Mix-A-Lot
Users who want to join the Mix-A-Lot room and see the Mix-A-Lot avatar can 1) Visit www.giantthinkwell.com 2) Drag the Turntable/Mixalot bookmarklet to their toolbar 3) Click on the bookmarklet to enter the room 4) Click on the bookmarklet again to see the custom icon.
Mix-A-Lot will be performing between 2:30 and 5:00pm PST. Still in beta, Turntable.fm Twitter mentions continue to soar, clocking in 13K tweets last week.
Turntable.fm founders Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen sat down with TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about the rise of Turntable.fm from the ashes of Stickybits, among other things. “It was less of a pivot and more of a restart,” Chasen said, on why he decided to dump the team’s original intent of making random barcode scanning a ubiquitous behavior in order to focus on the more promising Turntable.
“One day Billy came to me and said hey I’ve got this idea for a chat room with avatars and music and I said, ‘Hey that’s genius.'” Goldstein recounted. Fast forward from Turntable’s launch (via a single tweet on May 19th) to today, when the service is hitting a million songs streamed a day, with over 600K users, more than 300K rooms and 25 million songs “awesomed.”
“This taps into something pretty deep, people want to experience music together,” Goldstein tried to explain the app’s success. “The expectations were pretty low, and then when it hit it hit pretty obviously and it grew really organically. Our biggest challenge now is [scaling] the extent to which we have great coverage in the SF, NY and LA in music digital hipster indie community … How do we do we crossover to college campuses and really across the country to become a broader mass market consumer experience without losing this incredible passionate hard-core user base?”
The pair wakes tomorrow morning ready to face this challenge, with a cool $7 million in their pocket and a snazzy new iPhone app in the App Store.
Turntable today introduced Piki, a Pandora-like, human-powered radio app combined with powerful Twitter-inspired social features. With Piki, the most impressive part is that Turntable is one of the first music startups to get social right. The company has been working on the brand-new service for a year.
“There’s still demand to listen to music that’s powered by other people, instead of an algorithm like Pandora,” Billy Chasen, co-founder and CEO of Turntable, said during a demo for TechCrunch. “But instead of having it in very real-time, in a room like Turntable, we are providing a laid-back experience with Piki,” he continued.
Unlike competitors 8tracks or Songza, it has borrowed one of the most powerful features of Pandora. You just start the app and press play without having to search, browse, or select your mood. The stream goes through songs hand-picked by your friends and offers the option to select a particular genre.
When it comes to using the social aspect, you have multiple unique features at hand. You can share tracks that you like, which is called picking or repicking them. Even though you can add a personal message, you can actually dedicate a song to a friend and it will appear in their Piki notifications and streams.
To add a track to your profile, you can search the song database, choose a track on your iOS device, or make your phone listen and identify the song. Your Piki profile consists of songs you have recently liked. It is much more accurate than Last.fm’s profiles and much more useful than Spotify’s current profiles. At the same time, it isn’t as cumbersome as building playlists on 8tracks.
Piki has a desktop version as well. “Piki is for mobile — the web version is there for people that are using it at their desks,” Chasen said. Right now, users can register for an invitation on Piki’s website. The web beta should open its doors in the coming days and the iOS app will hit the App Store in a month or two.
Chasen was very eager to tell me everything about Piki. The team seems very committed to the app, which is in some ways a move away from Turntable’s current user experience toward a more mainstream and personal music product. “This is a year in the making. It’s been hard because, over the past year, people have asked ‘what’s going on,’ but we couldn’t really talk about it until now,” Chasen said.
Chasen believes that people use multiple music services even though it’s a crowded market. “If I want to listen to a single album on repeat, I’ll use Spotify,” he said. Piki is not the service on which you’ll listen to Lady Gaga’s latest album. At the same time, it is not a passive radio-like experience like Pandora. In the middle, there is room for a music discovery application that remains very personal.
With Piki, you can hear that one song that your friend plays at every party, or you can say that a song makes you think about a particular person. That’s the reason why I’m so excited about Piki’s social features. It goes back to what made music great in the first place: it is much better to listen to music with your friends than by yourself.
No Pro Tools, no record players, no DJ skills required. With Crossfader, you just swipe between songs, pick two you like, and tilt back and forth to mix them into a mashup. This is Turntable.FM co-founder Seth Goldstein’s plot to turn legions of young ravers into creators.
The iOS app was built by Goldstein’s DJZ team, which is pivoting from a dance music news site into a Crossfader social hub that houses what happens when you combine Tiesto and Miley Cyrus or Diplo and Missy Elliot. This week Crossfader released a radio feature, so you can rock a party yourself or just play others’ sonic Frankenstein’s monsters, both on mobile and the web.
“How do you build a global remix community?” Goldstein asks. “First we had to build the instrument.”
Thanks to its use of the iPhone’s accelerometers, that’s how Crossfader feels. Like it’s alive in your hands rather than an app you’re interfacing with.
To make a mix, you flick through regularly updated “packs” of the best snippets of songs, like the drums and hook of a Skrillex jam or the lyrics of one by Dr. Dre. Pick one on each side of the screen and they both play at the same time.
Crossfader syncs the two songs’ timing, tempo, and key so they always sound good together. Keep your phone steady to hear them balanced in the mix, or tilt left or right to fade from one across to the other in real time. You might accentuate the vocals as the hook revs up, then tilt over to the beat as the drop hits with a wall of bass. Then you can lean Crossfader toward you/up to kill the bass and leave the anticipation-inducing high end audible. Then tilt the phone forward/down to filter out the high end and just get the deep, low frequencies like you’re dancing underwater.
Tire of either song and you can swap it out on the fly and Crossfader will make the transition happen smooth and on the beat. “This is about taste, not technique,” says Goldstein, explaining that a good ear for what sounds right matters more than the hand-eye coordination DJs need on traditional equipment.
That’s not exactly true, though. Get jostled or forget what you’re doing and you might whiplash your audience by accidentally switching from one sample to the other. A steady hand is important unless you want to sound scatter-brained. If you want a more professional tool, Djay, Traktor and Pacemaker are better choices.
Beyond the instrument side of the app, you can customize a DJ profile avatar for yourself. If you find a pair of songs that sound awesome and you can lock them together as a Crossfade, save it to your profile, and share in the app’s feed where other people can re-remix it, or out to Facebook and Twitter where they’ll play in-line.
Your creations could also end up on what was DJZ but is becoming a Crossfader content site. “DJZ goes away as a top-down editorial property and becomes a bottom-up remix community,” Goldstein explains.
See, Goldstein’s last big startup Turntable.fm imploded in late 2013. It started back in 2011 as a site where anyone could DJ live over the web for the friends and strangers who were represented as little head-bobbing avatars in a virtual club. But Turntable fell into the chasm between being a passive radio site you’d listen to in the background and an active music-themed chat room. It didn’t stick and royalties were piling up, so it shut down.
By then, Goldstein had already raised $1 million from Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Zynga’s Mark Pincus, and former Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter to make DJZ, a news hub for the electronic dance music scene that was blowing up. But it turns out the kids just want to dance, not read, so Goldstein began developing DJZ/U, an interactive tutorial app that would teach users to DJ. But the team realized that rather than teaching the complexities of DJing, they should just make the art simpler. DJZ pivoted to build Crossfader with another $2 million in funding from Shawn Gruver and Telegraph Hill Capital, and big-name DJs like Diplo and Atrak are advisers.
To succeed as a passive app where Turntable failed, Crossfader this week launched a radio feature. If enough people dig your mashup, it’ll wind up in Crossfader’s “Top Radio,” which automatically plays and smoothly transitions between the best remixes. You can also listen to a curated “Featured Radio” or discover “Fresh” song combos. Crossfader Radio means you can sit back and listen on web or mobile if you’re too lazy or busy to recombinate your own jams.
And the whole thing is free. Each song clip in the app is just 30 seconds long, so it’s considered a “preview.” Tap through and you can buy the songs on iTunes. Whether this is perfectly legal is debatable. The length doesn’t determine if something is fair use. If the record labels view Crossfader as useful promotion that doesn’t cannibalize sales, they may allow it. But if they think people are listening to it instead of streaming or buying music where they earn royalties, Goldstein may be in for some legal trouble.
He admits that Crossfader is in a gray area but says he feels good about their position as long it has short loops and buy buttons and doesn’t let you record. “All that being said, this is still an evolving space and so we will continue to work with rights holders to ensure that they feel like what we are doing drives discovery and promotion of their music, and over time drives monetization as well.”
Crossfader hopes to make some money for itself too by selling premium sonic effects like flanger, which gives songs that robotic ‘shhheeeaaaaarrrroooooooooooo’ sound.
In the end, Crossfader is fun to play with, but the question will be whether it’s useful to keep digital disc jockeys coming back. Music-listening apps like Spotify could always integrate better DJing features, and they already have trouble finding consistent users. Traction for a music-creation app will be even tougher, though it is magnitudes simpler than its peers.
“Instagram took 5 percent of the functionality of Photoshop and made it relevant to hundreds of millions of people,” Goldstein says. “There’s a bunch of apps out there like djay with the classic two turntable model, and we’re clearly not doing that. We seized on this idea of the crossfader as the minimal gesture of DJing.”
9/28/15 UPDATE: According to a blog post on its site, Plug.dj has shut down as of 3PM PT. A playlist export tool is available.
Remember the hotness that was Turntable.fm? It was a one of my favorite apps of a few years ago (2011 to be specific), since it was social and focused on music. For those who aren’t familiar with it, you’d have a little avatar that entered themed rooms where you could chat and you’d take turns being the DJ…playing your favorite music. Unfortunately, it shut down because paying labels and artists for the streams of those songs is ridiculously expensive thus returning our offices to full productivity (the thing was addictive). It raised $7M and still couldn’t survive.
A site called plug.dj had come along to fill the gap in 2013, smartly using YouTube videos to stream the music, but just can’t make ends meet and is now asking for donations. It’s likely to shut down too, causing me to give up on the social+music genre of apps completely. The company has raised $1.25M in seed funding. This is starting to sound familiar.
Here’s what the team had to say a week or so ago:
It has come to the point that the costs of running plug.dj exceeds the income that we are generating, and that could prove disastrous to the future of plug.dj if we don’t make some important changes very soon.
We have already scaled back our operating costs to the bare minimum in the hope that we can keep our servers online, the music pumping and the community connected.
We are dedicated to doing everything that we possibly can to keep plug.dj alive! But we can’t do it alone. We also need YOUR help!
If 6% of the people who use plug.dj each month donated just $6 today, or if 10% donated $1 each, we’d hit our goal needed to operate for the next 6+ months, build an Android app and pursue other fundraising opportunities. Without your help, we cannot continue to build the community we’ve all grown to love.
The company updated its progress in an email sent to its community today:
We’re a little halfway over our donation goal with only a few days left (at the time this email is written we’re at 62%). In order for plug.dj to exist next month, we need our amazing users to subscribe or donate; otherwise, we’ll have to shut our doors at the end of the month.
In an explanation of where the money goes, the team tries to share with its community what it takes to keep the thing afloat…since it’s a business and needs to pay its employees, after all.
While funding the site through the community is doable, it’s highly unlikely that plug.dj can be saved in a last second situation. It causes a lot of stress for everyone involved. Stranger things have happened though and it’s going to take some fast action and cash from its active community of users. In essence, we’re about to find out just how engaged they are. Could the site survive just by selling little trinkets and powerups for your avatar like they do as well and maybe charge a small subscription price in the future? Time’s running out.
Are you listening Sony? One of the other big labels? This kind of site is a great way to get your music out to fans and have them interact with musicians. Why not scoop plug.dj up and give its team a chance to prove out the model. It’d make a great experimental interface for a company like Spotify, too! Huh? Whatcha think Spotify?
Why can’t this app, platform and business model survive? Ugh.
UPDATE: plug.dj’s CEO and founder Alex Reinlieb jumped into the TC comments to share some stats and details about the site:
Across our thousands of active rooms, we have over several million music lovers from all around the globe that are curating over 40M songs monthly from the world’s largest media libraries. Our crowd-sourced approach enables us to optimize curation across a globally diverse set of genres as well as predict trending tracks at scale. Yes, tracks trend on our site before they hit the charts.
Our average user spends an average of 2 hrs 30 min per visit (YouTube boasts 40 min) selecting, listening and voting on songs/videos together in realtime, we actively generate highly relevant data on people’s interests that can power external playlists based on a genre, mood, or theme.
By the way, for all those in the e-sports realm, a major portion of our referral traffic comes from Twitch. People love to listen to music and participate while they watch gaming streams. They also love to learn from videos and listen to game music on our site.
Crosley’s turntables don’t have the best reputation among vinyl heads. Almost all of the record players the company makes are designed for first-time buyers. They’re cheap, both in terms of price and design.
The first turntable I owned was a Crosley . Most of the parts were plastic, and it didn’t produce great sound. If you played anything with heavy bass, the tone arm would skip around. The plastic cover on the top broke after six months, and the device eventually only produced sound at half volume after being “active” for a year. It wasn’t a great device, but it got me hooked on vinyl.
When I went to upgrade to a better deck, I didn’t think at all to get a Crosley. It’s the exact problem that Crosley the brand is looking to tackle with its newer C Series turntables, which includes three models. The first two models in the C Series came out last year (C10 and C100), while the newer C200 was announced at CES 2016 in January.
The Crosley C200 might see some success, too. While potentially a tough sell for users like myself who’ve had a sub-par experience in the past with earlier and cheaper models, a test-drive easily argued the case for entry and intermediate level users.
Specs
What I Like About It
The Crosely C200 is easy to set up. All you have to do is set the turntable platter in the center, install the headshell into the front of the tonearm, balance the tonearm and stylus pressure, and put on the turntable lid. If that sounds super complicated, don’t worry. Everything clicks together like LEGOs, and the directions are easy to follow.
Sometimes when you are setting up a new turntable, balancing the tonearm can be a bit of a hassle. That’s not the case for this turntable.
The adjustable pitch control is a nice touch, especially for more advanced users. The pitch control allows you to adjust your pitch and tempo for DJing, and it should help the device appeal to the more veteran crowd.
Most Crosley turntables look and feel cheap, but the C200 is an exception. The matte black finish, dazzling strobe dots, and more durable tonearm make for a sleek look and sturdy design.
I tested the sound quality of the C200 with a number of different genres, including indie rock, pop, deep house, ambient, and trap. I also played all sizes of records to check for any variances in performance. I played everything through a Bose home theater system, and the sound quality didn’t disappoint (even at an excessively loud volume).
At $279, the price is right. If you look at other turntables with similar features and design, you’ll find that this is a pretty good deal. Unless you are trying to be a professional DJ, this is a great deck to consider buying.
What I Don’t Like About It
The built-in pre-amp is good but not great. I tested this against my own pre-amp, and my pre-amp made the system sound significantly better. If you flip the phono switch on the back of the turntable and then run the RCA cables through your own pre-amp, you might have better sound results (as was the case for me). The sound is still good with the default pre-amp, but you might be able to make it sound even better with a little customization.
I also wish the package came with longer RCA cables. The pre-packaged cable is pretty short, so you might need to buy something longer depending on your home stereo setup. Fortunately, I had spare cables so this wasn’t a huge issue, but I could see this causing frustration for some users.
My biggest complaint about this turntable is what happens when you get to the end of a record. The record player doesn’t actually turn off, and the tone-arm doesn’t have a auto-return feature. This is a little irritating as it forces you to manually stop the record player after each listen. I’ve always liked record players that with stop when they finish or stay on and have the arm manually retract.
Bottom Line
The Crosley C200 is a great turntable, and I highly recommend checking it out it if you are in the market for a new record player. If the first turntable you bought was a cheaper, less sturdy one, and you don’t want to break the bank on a super high-end model, the C200 is a great upgrade. This is not a professional level turntable, but it’s not priced or designed to be that way.
The design is great, the price is fair, it’s easy to set up, and it sounds wonderful. More advanced features like pitch control are there if you want them, and the devices shortcomings are minor. The only reason I’d pass on this device is because it lacks a auto-return tone-arm.
Hopefully this is the start of something bigger for Crosley as they attempt to lasso more advanced users.
Crosley has teamed up with renowned leather maker Moore & Giles to release a limited edition of its high-end C10 turntable. The special version of the C10 features a leather slip mat plus a layer of leather on top of the base. And it’s extremely limited. In fact, only 40 were made, and TechCrunch was able to get its hands on the very first unit.
From a technical perspective, this is still the same Crosley C10 that was previously released. The specs are as follows:
And yes, this is a sharp-looking deck. Crosley sent the mahogany wood version, and it’s easily one of the better-looking turntables I’ve ever seen.
The topography of the land between Lynchburg and Louisville has been laser etched into the leather, giving the deck a unique and abstract look. The geography is a nod to the area shared by Crosley and Moore & Giles.
[gallery ids="1410437,1410443,1410438,1410439,1410441,1410442,1410440"]The audio quality on the C10 is excellent, but it lacks a few playback features that other turntables in this price range often have. First, the C10 doesn’t come with a built-in pre-amp, so you’ll need to provide one yourself. A quality pre-amp will run you about $100.
Second, there’s no easy way to switch the playback speed from the exterior of the deck (from 33 1/3 to 45 RPM). Typically turntables in this price range will have a switch on the base to easily change speeds, but that’s not the case here. If you want to switch speeds, you have to remove the plate, adjust the band on the motor and then put the plate back in place.
It’s a bit burdensome, as demonstrated below.
Third, there’s no auto-return arm, auto-lift or motor shut-off feature. This isn’t a deal-breaker, but I like some sort of safeguard that lifts the needle off the record at the end of a session.
The Crosley Commonwealth C10 turntable costs $840 and is available for pre-order on Moore & Giles’ website. That’s about double the price of the original C10. I’m not an expert on leather prices by any means, but that’s a pretty big premium for a purely aesthetic upgrade. A couple hundred bucks over the original C10 price seems more reasonable.
The Moore & Giles / Crosley Commonwealth C10 is a fancy turntable with amazing sound and a sleek look, but it’s quite expensive for what you get. There are a few features that it lacks that I wish it had, but none are deal breakers. Given that the tech specs are the same as the original C10, it really boils down to how much you are willing to pay for the new look.
Ever wonder how super angel and man-about-town Chris Sacca spends his Friday nights? Well, right now you can find him at Turntable.fm, a stealthy, you-can-only-get-in-if-you-know-someone online DJ party. I just stumbled onto it by accident. You can only gain entry if you are Facebook friends with someone already inside.
As it happens, I knew some people. Turntable.fm is a project of Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen, the two guys who brought us Stickybits. You enter and there are different DJ rooms to choose from. There are probably 25 people there right now (this is still in private alpha). But in one room called “Let’s rock old-ish hip-hop,” there was Sacca, Goldstein, YouTube’s Hunter Walk, and Mike Marquez of CODE Advisors. Sacca was playing “Push It” by Salt-n-Pepa, up on the DJ platform (he gets to wear the space helmet because he has a lot of points, which are awarded to him by other people in the room who like what he plays).
Everyone in a room has an avatar and can chat with each other. You can create your own playliist and get up on the DJ table to battle it out. People tend to talk a lot of smack. But it’s fun, and addictive enough that I didn’t leave after 20 seconds. Turntable.fm needs a lot of fine-tuning (in fact a lot of the chat was about features it coud use, such as better animations for the avatars or different ways to award points.
In the end, Turntable.fm is really about hanging out with people and discovering music. If a DJ is playing a song you like, you can add it to your playlist, buy it on iTunes, findi it on Last.fm, or launch Spotify.
What’s a surefire sign that a web service has hit the big time? Well, when the celebrities start to pile on of course!
The guys behind GiantThinkwell and the Mixnmatch game have teamed up with the Grammy award winning producer, emcee and lover of the natural female form Sir Mix-Alot for a rare Turntable.fm performance celebrating the game’s launch.
“We’re huge fans of turntable.fm.,” says GiantThinkwell co-founder Adam Tratt. “In fact, we’re Cameron-Diaz-in-Vanilla-Sky crazy for it. (We <3 you, @seth & @billychasen.) Having Mix host a set in Turntable would be slick, but having Mix as a skinny white guy with a faux-hawk simply wouldn’t do. With our release on the way out the door and the sun rising in Seattle, we set our plan in motion: to get Sir Mix-A-Lot hosting a Turntable.fm room… with a custom Sir Mix-A-Lot avatar.”
In order to create a custom Sir Mix-A-Lot avatar, Tratt creatively rigged a custom piece of Javascript to transform the ubiquitous Turntable.fm icons into the spitting avatar image of Mix-A-Lot
Users who want to join the Mix-A-Lot room and see the Mix-A-Lot avatar can 1) Visit www.giantthinkwell.com 2) Drag the Turntable/Mixalot bookmarklet to their toolbar 3) Click on the bookmarklet to enter the room 4) Click on the bookmarklet again to see the custom icon.
Mix-A-Lot will be performing between 2:30 and 5:00pm PST. Still in beta, Turntable.fm Twitter mentions continue to soar, clocking in 13K tweets last week.
Turntable.fm founders Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen sat down with TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about the rise of Turntable.fm from the ashes of Stickybits, among other things. “It was less of a pivot and more of a restart,” Chasen said, on why he decided to dump the team’s original intent of making random barcode scanning a ubiquitous behavior in order to focus on the more promising Turntable.
“One day Billy came to me and said hey I’ve got this idea for a chat room with avatars and music and I said, ‘Hey that’s genius.'” Goldstein recounted. Fast forward from Turntable’s launch (via a single tweet on May 19th) to today, when the service is hitting a million songs streamed a day, with over 600K users, more than 300K rooms and 25 million songs “awesomed.”
“This taps into something pretty deep, people want to experience music together,” Goldstein tried to explain the app’s success. “The expectations were pretty low, and then when it hit it hit pretty obviously and it grew really organically. Our biggest challenge now is [scaling] the extent to which we have great coverage in the SF, NY and LA in music digital hipster indie community … How do we do we crossover to college campuses and really across the country to become a broader mass market consumer experience without losing this incredible passionate hard-core user base?”
The pair wakes tomorrow morning ready to face this challenge, with a cool $7 million in their pocket and a snazzy new iPhone app in the App Store.
Turntable today introduced Piki, a Pandora-like, human-powered radio app combined with powerful Twitter-inspired social features. With Piki, the most impressive part is that Turntable is one of the first music startups to get social right. The company has been working on the brand-new service for a year.
“There’s still demand to listen to music that’s powered by other people, instead of an algorithm like Pandora,” Billy Chasen, co-founder and CEO of Turntable, said during a demo for TechCrunch. “But instead of having it in very real-time, in a room like Turntable, we are providing a laid-back experience with Piki,” he continued.
Unlike competitors 8tracks or Songza, it has borrowed one of the most powerful features of Pandora. You just start the app and press play without having to search, browse, or select your mood. The stream goes through songs hand-picked by your friends and offers the option to select a particular genre.
When it comes to using the social aspect, you have multiple unique features at hand. You can share tracks that you like, which is called picking or repicking them. Even though you can add a personal message, you can actually dedicate a song to a friend and it will appear in their Piki notifications and streams.
To add a track to your profile, you can search the song database, choose a track on your iOS device, or make your phone listen and identify the song. Your Piki profile consists of songs you have recently liked. It is much more accurate than Last.fm’s profiles and much more useful than Spotify’s current profiles. At the same time, it isn’t as cumbersome as building playlists on 8tracks.
Piki has a desktop version as well. “Piki is for mobile — the web version is there for people that are using it at their desks,” Chasen said. Right now, users can register for an invitation on Piki’s website. The web beta should open its doors in the coming days and the iOS app will hit the App Store in a month or two.
Chasen was very eager to tell me everything about Piki. The team seems very committed to the app, which is in some ways a move away from Turntable’s current user experience toward a more mainstream and personal music product. “This is a year in the making. It’s been hard because, over the past year, people have asked ‘what’s going on,’ but we couldn’t really talk about it until now,” Chasen said.
Chasen believes that people use multiple music services even though it’s a crowded market. “If I want to listen to a single album on repeat, I’ll use Spotify,” he said. Piki is not the service on which you’ll listen to Lady Gaga’s latest album. At the same time, it is not a passive radio-like experience like Pandora. In the middle, there is room for a music discovery application that remains very personal.
With Piki, you can hear that one song that your friend plays at every party, or you can say that a song makes you think about a particular person. That’s the reason why I’m so excited about Piki’s social features. It goes back to what made music great in the first place: it is much better to listen to music with your friends than by yourself.
No Pro Tools, no record players, no DJ skills required. With Crossfader, you just swipe between songs, pick two you like, and tilt back and forth to mix them into a mashup. This is Turntable.FM co-founder Seth Goldstein’s plot to turn legions of young ravers into creators.
The iOS app was built by Goldstein’s DJZ team, which is pivoting from a dance music news site into a Crossfader social hub that houses what happens when you combine Tiesto and Miley Cyrus or Diplo and Missy Elliot. This week Crossfader released a radio feature, so you can rock a party yourself or just play others’ sonic Frankenstein’s monsters, both on mobile and the web.
“How do you build a global remix community?” Goldstein asks. “First we had to build the instrument.”
Thanks to its use of the iPhone’s accelerometers, that’s how Crossfader feels. Like it’s alive in your hands rather than an app you’re interfacing with.
To make a mix, you flick through regularly updated “packs” of the best snippets of songs, like the drums and hook of a Skrillex jam or the lyrics of one by Dr. Dre. Pick one on each side of the screen and they both play at the same time.
Crossfader syncs the two songs’ timing, tempo, and key so they always sound good together. Keep your phone steady to hear them balanced in the mix, or tilt left or right to fade from one across to the other in real time. You might accentuate the vocals as the hook revs up, then tilt over to the beat as the drop hits with a wall of bass. Then you can lean Crossfader toward you/up to kill the bass and leave the anticipation-inducing high end audible. Then tilt the phone forward/down to filter out the high end and just get the deep, low frequencies like you’re dancing underwater.
Tire of either song and you can swap it out on the fly and Crossfader will make the transition happen smooth and on the beat. “This is about taste, not technique,” says Goldstein, explaining that a good ear for what sounds right matters more than the hand-eye coordination DJs need on traditional equipment.
That’s not exactly true, though. Get jostled or forget what you’re doing and you might whiplash your audience by accidentally switching from one sample to the other. A steady hand is important unless you want to sound scatter-brained. If you want a more professional tool, Djay, Traktor and Pacemaker are better choices.
Beyond the instrument side of the app, you can customize a DJ profile avatar for yourself. If you find a pair of songs that sound awesome and you can lock them together as a Crossfade, save it to your profile, and share in the app’s feed where other people can re-remix it, or out to Facebook and Twitter where they’ll play in-line.
Your creations could also end up on what was DJZ but is becoming a Crossfader content site. “DJZ goes away as a top-down editorial property and becomes a bottom-up remix community,” Goldstein explains.
See, Goldstein’s last big startup Turntable.fm imploded in late 2013. It started back in 2011 as a site where anyone could DJ live over the web for the friends and strangers who were represented as little head-bobbing avatars in a virtual club. But Turntable fell into the chasm between being a passive radio site you’d listen to in the background and an active music-themed chat room. It didn’t stick and royalties were piling up, so it shut down.
By then, Goldstein had already raised $1 million from Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Zynga’s Mark Pincus, and former Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter to make DJZ, a news hub for the electronic dance music scene that was blowing up. But it turns out the kids just want to dance, not read, so Goldstein began developing DJZ/U, an interactive tutorial app that would teach users to DJ. But the team realized that rather than teaching the complexities of DJing, they should just make the art simpler. DJZ pivoted to build Crossfader with another $2 million in funding from Shawn Gruver and Telegraph Hill Capital, and big-name DJs like Diplo and Atrak are advisers.
To succeed as a passive app where Turntable failed, Crossfader this week launched a radio feature. If enough people dig your mashup, it’ll wind up in Crossfader’s “Top Radio,” which automatically plays and smoothly transitions between the best remixes. You can also listen to a curated “Featured Radio” or discover “Fresh” song combos. Crossfader Radio means you can sit back and listen on web or mobile if you’re too lazy or busy to recombinate your own jams.
And the whole thing is free. Each song clip in the app is just 30 seconds long, so it’s considered a “preview.” Tap through and you can buy the songs on iTunes. Whether this is perfectly legal is debatable. The length doesn’t determine if something is fair use. If the record labels view Crossfader as useful promotion that doesn’t cannibalize sales, they may allow it. But if they think people are listening to it instead of streaming or buying music where they earn royalties, Goldstein may be in for some legal trouble.
He admits that Crossfader is in a gray area but says he feels good about their position as long it has short loops and buy buttons and doesn’t let you record. “All that being said, this is still an evolving space and so we will continue to work with rights holders to ensure that they feel like what we are doing drives discovery and promotion of their music, and over time drives monetization as well.”
Crossfader hopes to make some money for itself too by selling premium sonic effects like flanger, which gives songs that robotic ‘shhheeeaaaaarrrroooooooooooo’ sound.
In the end, Crossfader is fun to play with, but the question will be whether it’s useful to keep digital disc jockeys coming back. Music-listening apps like Spotify could always integrate better DJing features, and they already have trouble finding consistent users. Traction for a music-creation app will be even tougher, though it is magnitudes simpler than its peers.
“Instagram took 5 percent of the functionality of Photoshop and made it relevant to hundreds of millions of people,” Goldstein says. “There’s a bunch of apps out there like djay with the classic two turntable model, and we’re clearly not doing that. We seized on this idea of the crossfader as the minimal gesture of DJing.”
9/28/15 UPDATE: According to a blog post on its site, Plug.dj has shut down as of 3PM PT. A playlist export tool is available.
Remember the hotness that was Turntable.fm? It was a one of my favorite apps of a few years ago (2011 to be specific), since it was social and focused on music. For those who aren’t familiar with it, you’d have a little avatar that entered themed rooms where you could chat and you’d take turns being the DJ…playing your favorite music. Unfortunately, it shut down because paying labels and artists for the streams of those songs is ridiculously expensive thus returning our offices to full productivity (the thing was addictive). It raised $7M and still couldn’t survive.
A site called plug.dj had come along to fill the gap in 2013, smartly using YouTube videos to stream the music, but just can’t make ends meet and is now asking for donations. It’s likely to shut down too, causing me to give up on the social+music genre of apps completely. The company has raised $1.25M in seed funding. This is starting to sound familiar.
Here’s what the team had to say a week or so ago:
It has come to the point that the costs of running plug.dj exceeds the income that we are generating, and that could prove disastrous to the future of plug.dj if we don’t make some important changes very soon.
We have already scaled back our operating costs to the bare minimum in the hope that we can keep our servers online, the music pumping and the community connected.
We are dedicated to doing everything that we possibly can to keep plug.dj alive! But we can’t do it alone. We also need YOUR help!
If 6% of the people who use plug.dj each month donated just $6 today, or if 10% donated $1 each, we’d hit our goal needed to operate for the next 6+ months, build an Android app and pursue other fundraising opportunities. Without your help, we cannot continue to build the community we’ve all grown to love.
The company updated its progress in an email sent to its community today:
We’re a little halfway over our donation goal with only a few days left (at the time this email is written we’re at 62%). In order for plug.dj to exist next month, we need our amazing users to subscribe or donate; otherwise, we’ll have to shut our doors at the end of the month.
In an explanation of where the money goes, the team tries to share with its community what it takes to keep the thing afloat…since it’s a business and needs to pay its employees, after all.
While funding the site through the community is doable, it’s highly unlikely that plug.dj can be saved in a last second situation. It causes a lot of stress for everyone involved. Stranger things have happened though and it’s going to take some fast action and cash from its active community of users. In essence, we’re about to find out just how engaged they are. Could the site survive just by selling little trinkets and powerups for your avatar like they do as well and maybe charge a small subscription price in the future? Time’s running out.
Are you listening Sony? One of the other big labels? This kind of site is a great way to get your music out to fans and have them interact with musicians. Why not scoop plug.dj up and give its team a chance to prove out the model. It’d make a great experimental interface for a company like Spotify, too! Huh? Whatcha think Spotify?
Why can’t this app, platform and business model survive? Ugh.
UPDATE: plug.dj’s CEO and founder Alex Reinlieb jumped into the TC comments to share some stats and details about the site:
Across our thousands of active rooms, we have over several million music lovers from all around the globe that are curating over 40M songs monthly from the world’s largest media libraries. Our crowd-sourced approach enables us to optimize curation across a globally diverse set of genres as well as predict trending tracks at scale. Yes, tracks trend on our site before they hit the charts.
Our average user spends an average of 2 hrs 30 min per visit (YouTube boasts 40 min) selecting, listening and voting on songs/videos together in realtime, we actively generate highly relevant data on people’s interests that can power external playlists based on a genre, mood, or theme.
By the way, for all those in the e-sports realm, a major portion of our referral traffic comes from Twitch. People love to listen to music and participate while they watch gaming streams. They also love to learn from videos and listen to game music on our site.
Crosley’s turntables don’t have the best reputation among vinyl heads. Almost all of the record players the company makes are designed for first-time buyers. They’re cheap, both in terms of price and design.
The first turntable I owned was a Crosley. Most of the parts were plastic, and it didn’t produce great sound. If you played anything with heavy bass, the tone arm would skip around. The plastic cover on the top broke after six months, and the device eventually only produced sound at half volume after being “active” for a year. It wasn’t a great device, but it got me hooked on vinyl.
When I went to upgrade to a better deck, I didn’t think at all to get a Crosley. It’s the exact problem that Crosley the brand is looking to tackle with its newer C Series turntables, which includes three models. The first two models in the C Series came out last year (C10 and C100), while the newer C200 was announced at CES 2016 in January.
The Crosley C200 might see some success, too. While potentially a tough sell for users like myself who’ve had a sub-par experience in the past with earlier and cheaper models, a test-drive easily argued the case for entry and intermediate level users.
Specs
What I Like About It
The Crosely C200 is easy to set up. All you have to do is set the turntable platter in the center, install the headshell into the front of the tonearm, balance the tonearm and stylus pressure, and put on the turntable lid. If that sounds super complicated, don’t worry. Everything clicks together like LEGOs, and the directions are easy to follow.
Sometimes when you are setting up a new turntable, balancing the tonearm can be a bit of a hassle. That’s not the case for this turntable.
The adjustable pitch control is a nice touch, especially for more advanced users. The pitch control allows you to adjust your pitch and tempo for DJing, and it should help the device appeal to the more veteran crowd.
Most Crosley turntables look and feel cheap, but the C200 is an exception. The matte black finish, dazzling strobe dots, and more durable tonearm make for a sleek look and sturdy design.
I tested the sound quality of the C200 with a number of different genres, including indie rock, pop, deep house, ambient, and trap. I also played all sizes of records to check for any variances in performance. I played everything through a Bose home theater system, and the sound quality didn’t disappoint (even at an excessively loud volume).
At $279, the price is right. If you look at other turntables with similar features and design, you’ll find that this is a pretty good deal. Unless you are trying to be a professional DJ, this is a great deck to consider buying.
What I Don’t Like About It
The built-in pre-amp is good but not great. I tested this against my own pre-amp, and my pre-amp made the system sound significantly better. If you flip the phono switch on the back of the turntable and then run the RCA cables through your own pre-amp, you might have better sound results (as was the case for me). The sound is still good with the default pre-amp, but you might be able to make it sound even better with a little customization.
I also wish the package came with longer RCA cables. The pre-packaged cable is pretty short, so you might need to buy something longer depending on your home stereo setup. Fortunately, I had spare cables so this wasn’t a huge issue, but I could see this causing frustration for some users.
My biggest complaint about this turntable is what happens when you get to the end of a record. The record player doesn’t actually turn off, and the tone-arm doesn’t have a auto-return feature. This is a little irritating as it forces you to manually stop the record player after each listen. I’ve always liked record players that with stop when they finish or stay on and have the arm manually retract.
Bottom Line
The Crosley C200 is a great turntable, and I highly recommend checking it out it if you are in the market for a new record player. If the first turntable you bought was a cheaper, less sturdy one, and you don’t want to break the bank on a super high-end model, the C200 is a great upgrade. This is not a professional level turntable, but it’s not priced or designed to be that way.
The design is great, the price is fair, it’s easy to set up, and it sounds wonderful. More advanced features like pitch control are there if you want them, and the devices shortcomings are minor. The only reason I’d pass on this device is because it lacks a auto-return tone-arm.
Hopefully this is the start of something bigger for Crosley as they attempt to lasso more advanced users.
Crosley has teamed up with renowned leather maker Moore & Giles to release a limited edition of its high-end C10 turntable. The special version of the C10 features a leather slip mat plus a layer of leather on top of the base. And it’s extremely limited. In fact, only 40 were made, and TechCrunch was able to get its hands on the very first unit.
From a technical perspective, this is still the same Crosley C10 that was previously released. The specs are as follows:
And yes, this is a sharp-looking deck. Crosley sent the mahogany wood version, and it’s easily one of the better-looking turntables I’ve ever seen.
The topography of the land between Lynchburg and Louisville has been laser etched into the leather, giving the deck a unique and abstract look. The geography is a nod to the area shared by Crosley and Moore & Giles.
[gallery ids="1410437,1410443,1410438,1410439,1410441,1410442,1410440"]
The audio quality on the C10 is excellent, but it lacks a few playback features that other turntables in this price range often have. First, the C10 doesn’t come with a built-in pre-amp, so you’ll need to provide one yourself. A quality pre-amp will run you about $100.
Second, there’s no easy way to switch the playback speed from the exterior of the deck (from 33 1/3 to 45 RPM). Typically turntables in this price range will have a switch on the base to easily change speeds, but that’s not the case here. If you want to switch speeds, you have to remove the plate, adjust the band on the motor and then put the plate back in place.
It’s a bit burdensome, as demonstrated below.
Third, there’s no auto-return arm, auto-lift or motor shut-off feature. This isn’t a deal-breaker, but I like some sort of safeguard that lifts the needle off the record at the end of a session.
The Crosley Commonwealth C10 turntable costs $840 and is available for pre-order on Moore & Giles’ website. That’s about double the price of the original C10. I’m not an expert on leather prices by any means, but that’s a pretty big premium for a purely aesthetic upgrade. A couple hundred bucks over the original C10 price seems more reasonable.
The Moore & Giles / Crosley Commonwealth C10 is a fancy turntable with amazing sound and a sleek look, but it’s quite expensive for what you get. There are a few features that it lacks that I wish it had, but none are deal breakers. Given that the tech specs are the same as the original C10, it really boils down to how much you are willing to pay for the new look.
You’d be forgiven for being confused. I’ve been following this story and am currently writing it and I’m still fairly confused. But Turntable (or tt.fm), not to be confused with Turntable.fm (the name of both the original and recently re-released social music app) today just announced that it has launched iOS, Android and desktop versions of its own service.
By way of brief explanation, the original Turntable.fm shut down in 2013 to focus on a live music platform. It was a sad day for those of us who wasted countless workday hours on the site. But stuff happens. People change, companies pivot.
Of course, that nostalgia returned something fierce when we were all stuck inside for the past year, searching for a social connection. Those of us of a certain age who maybe haven’t gone all in on Twitch started pining for the site. So founder Billy Chasen planned a return. In its current beta iteration, it’s a bit of a time capsule, albeit with a few key changes like relying on YouTube streaming to circumvent some royalty issues. It works well. I’ve been using it. It’s fun. Oh, and the company just raised $7.5 million to bring it into the new decade.
Seemingly around the same time, an early Turntable.fm employee decided to launch another take on the service. Focused on mobile usage and opting for the crowdfunding route, TT.fm rode that wave of nostalgia to $500,000 in funding, announced back in March.
Today that service is launching in beta. It’s in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store as we speak. Or you can visit it in a browser. Like Turntable.fm, tt.fm (as we’re going to refer to it for simplicity’s sake) relies on third-party music services. At launch, music is pulled from a linked Spotify or Apple Music account, as well as Soundcloud. YouTube functionality is coming soon.
As you can see from the above shot, the offering is based on the same format as Turntable.fm, with similar but different graphics. DJs play songs on the stage and the audience bops their heads in approval if they like it. One of the ways the new offering is looking to distinguish itself is through hosted DJ sets from artists.
“Original Turntable fans are eager to get back on the dancefloor and have been asking for a product that serves their needs,” Founder and CEO Joseph Perla said in a release, “including live DJ sets, social networking with music fans, music sharing and an online music community.”
As a fan of Turntable.fm, suddenly going from zero to two services feels like an embarrassment of riches. But the question remains whether it can move beyond a niche and really thrive in the crowded media environment of 2021. There’s probably room for one Turntable.fm.
But two? This already strange story is likely only getting stranger.
Yeah, yeah. I know. Buying a record player isn’t going to fix everything that’s broken. But it was a nice thought, however fleeting. Long before the iPod, this strange mutant existed. Too weird to live, too strange to die, as someone once famously put it.
The Audio-Technica Sound Burger — as it has affectionately come to be known — has also felt like a glimpse into some alternate timeline, where vinyl records didn’t have to go away entirely to make a resurgence. Obviously the size of a 12-inch LP immediately mitigates any pretension of portability, so in the era of the Walkman, a product like this was always destined to be an evolutionary dead end.
That, of course, hasn’t stopped countless companies from producing countless knockoffs in the intervening decades. Nor, thankfully, has it precluded Audio-Technica from taking another spin with the delightful AT-SB2022. The newly announced take on the form factor is priced at $199 and is — understandably — a limited edition. The release was specifically timed to coincide with the company’s 60th anniversary.
Unlike its ancestor, which was built with wired headphones in mind (and shipped with a pair for that matter), this version has built-in connectivity, so you can pair it with a wireless headset or speakers. There’s also a built-in battery rechargeable via USB-C that can get up to 12 hours in a single go. So, it’s not going to make all the bad news go away, but it sure would be a lot of fun to bring along for an afternoon of crate digging.
Image Credits: Audio Technica
If your pockets are considerably deeper, there’s always this fully transparent limited edition AT-LP2022 available for a cool $1,200. The belt-drive-operated manual turntable sports a Shibata stylus and carbon-fiber tonearm, all for the price of six Sound Burgers. If that’s not enough, there’s always this $9,000 stereo cartridge with a lab-grown diamond.
Maybe that will help drown out the news for a bit.
The Crosley C200 is a great turntable, and I highly recommend checking it out it if you are in the market for a new record player. The design is great, the price is fair, it’s easy to set up, and it sounds wonderful. 
Crosley has teamed up with renowned leather maker Moore & Giles to release a limited edition of its high-end C10 turntable. The special version of the C10 features a leather slip mat plus a layer of leather on top of the base. And it’s extremely limited. In fact, only 40 were made, and TechCrunch was able to get its hands on the very first unit. From a technical perspective, this… 
