Turntable.fm

Music streaming service Turntable.fm is apparently in trouble. The site was a hit in summer 2011: "Spotify is great, but Turntable.fm is amazing," wrote the New York Times. "[Turntable.fm] has upended how I listen to music."

But "then traffic started falling. By autumn, it dwindled to less than half its peak," writes Inc. Digital Music News wrote about the trend in February (RAIN coverage here). The founders of the site "agree the music fans are still out there." The question is how to get them back.

The answer, they think, is Pandora-like Internet radio. "It will be something like Pandora, but with playlists based on the recommendations of the user’s Turntable friends," Inc. writes of the project, codenamed Kiwi. "This will attract passive listeners interested in hearing friends’ favorites, just not chatting or collecting points in a live Turntable room."

Turntable.fm offers users the ability to listen to music in real-time with other users (RAIN coverage here).

You can find Inc.'s coverage here and more from HypeBot here.

Turntable.fm is the latest music streaming service that sees potential in the Internet radio model. Rdio and Spotify are also reportedly developing Pandora-like services (RAIN coverage here and here).

Innovative web music service Turntable.fm has reached licensing deals with the four major labels, "allowing it to leave the legal gray zone it had been operating in and expand into international markets," writes the New York Times. We reported in September that such licensing discsussions were underway (here).

"Basically this means we’re legitimate," said the company's chairman Seth Goldstein. Turntable.fm apparently had planned to operate under a DMCA license, like those used by non-interactive webcasters. However, these latest deals, directly with the copyright owners, are likely more similar to deals services like Spotify, Rdio, and MOG have entered.

Turntable.fm allows users to essentailly act like a radio DJ, playing hand-picked music to other users in real-time. It incorporates many social and game-like elements too (RAIN coverage here).

The New York Times has more coverage here.

Group music listening site Turntable.fm tonight holds the Mashtival music fest: more than 20 "mashup" artists in three different Turntable "rooms" will perform.

Users gather in online music site Turntable.fm's "rooms" where they take turns DJ-ing. Listeners can rate how well each DJ is performing, adding social and gaming elements to the service. Several Turntable.fm rooms are now dedicated to the art of "mash-ups," musical works created by combining two or more pre-recorded songs by (for example) "overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the instrumental track of another ." Google "Girl Talk" or Danger Mouse's "Grey Album."

Wired reports the event, beginning at 7pm Eastern, will take place in three rooms. Each room’s five DJ spots will have a couple VIP DJs as well as up-and-coming mashup artists.

There's more info on Mashtival's Facebook page here. Read more in Wired here.

Cloud music, recommendation engines and group listening. Those are just a few of the big online music trends of 2011, according to a new ReadWriteWeb article.

The year was good for algorithm-powered Internet radio services, with Pandora going public in February and the Echo Nest fueling new music services like iHeartRadio.

"As powerful as these machine-driven recommendation engines can be, there's still something to be said for human curation," writes ReadWriteWeb, pointing out that human-curated music services like Turntable.fm (pictured) and Shufflr.fm gained in popularity during the year.

Turntable.fm drove another 2011 web music trend, one that harkens back to AM/FM: group listening, where many users hear the same music at once. Meanwhile, Facebook forcefully introduced social features to streaming services while giant tech companies pushed music into the cloud.

You can find ReadWriteWeb's full analysis of the biggest Internet music trends of 2011 here.

"With the online musical landscape growing bigger by the day, artists are turning to music-nerd site of the moment Turntable.fm as a unique way to connect with fans and promote their projects." So writes Wired in their article on artists using the user-powered Internet radio site.

One artist opens his live shows with a Turntable.fm session projected on the wall of the venue (and programmed in part by fans at home). Other artists play new music on the site to gauge fan reaction, or DJ rooms as a way to simply connect and chat with fans.

Turntable.fm offers artists "verified" accounts (as on Twitter) and special avatars.

“I think artists love Turntable because it gives them an intimate way to interact with their fans,” co-founder co-founder Billy Chasen told Wired. “It’s like showing up at a small venue and surprising everyone with a show, except they get to chat with everyone during the show. It turns fans into super-fans.”

You can find the full article here.

Evolver.fm's Eliot Van Buskirk notes that what may have been "the neatest thing about Facebook Music" is currently missing. That is, real-time group listening a la Turntable.fm, where a group of online users are listening to the same music at the same time.

But he writes (here, reprinted by CNN) that "at least two streaming radio services plan to implement it. Slacker, specifically, says it has been working with Facebook to do so for months."