Whither Turntable?

I recently went to a music site I had used heavily last year. It featured various rooms catering to different tastes from “DJ Wooooo's House/Dance/Electro” to “Indie while you work,” containing rooms of cutesy doe-eyed avatars bouncing up and down to a virtual deejay console populated by users themselves. Last year, the site was viewed as one of the hottest new social networking properties and drew backing from celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Jimmy Fallon.

I was surprised to see how deserted the site is now. Where once users vied to get a seat in the deejay lineup, it's now pretty easy. The rooms were much emptier and the look and feel had not changed that much from last year. I came across an Inc. article that addressed what went wrong.

The story explains that the site couldn't cope with growth. It had to block international users because of licensing limits. Turntable delayed the launch of its Android app. The product itself had issues: It overlooked the passive nature of listening to music. Most people couldn't deejay during the work day. I myself had stopped using the site because it didn't work on my office desktop. Pandora did.

Turntable’s experience underscores the importance of staying on top of game, pivoting where needed and hiring smart people to scale up while there's momentum. Perhaps if the Android app and revamped user login system, where you don't have to use Facebook to enter the site, take off, users will give Turntable another spin.