Earlier this year, Billy Chasen, founder of Turntable.fm, washed out the old site and revived it for the epidemic era. I know I have never felt nostalgia for the service in those long, dull days of taking refuge in that place alone. March 2020 was the best time to resume, but March 2021 was very good. Today Chasen announced that the service is a great little piece of VC backing service (which so far only provided the invitation / password) to help take the next step. Anderson Horowitz led $7.5 million a decade after the site’s original launch.
Grants through services such as Patreon and Venmo have so far been limited. He noted that he would close the patron of the service. Chasen is ultimately silent on where the funds will go, noting, “And now with new fundraising we can innovate and truly explore the cross-section of social + music. I have a lot of ideas for places and I am excited to build them.” However, a blog post notices that the company is hiring engineers and designers. Understandably, although some people have been enjoying this site for the past few months, I was really surprised at how much the whole thing felt.
The team found a clever gap around music rights in the form of YouTube videos, but future versions of the service will likely be more directly related to popular applications such as music licensing or Spotify. A mobile app would be great, if I just spit here. Turntable.fm shut down again in early 2013 and said at the time, “It was a tough decision to make because we love this community so much, but the cost of running a music service is very expensive and we can’t afford it. It’s monetization and with our effort to reduce costs, the service added that it is focusing on a live event platform instead. Notably, Turntable.fm is not the only turntable service to relaunch in 2021. There is also Turntable.org (misleadingly located at TTFM), which is looking for fan funds, as well as subscription fees.
It announced that it had raised $500,000 in March and was aiming to launch in April for a mobile and desktop version. The site is currently reading, “We’re creating a new version just as fun as the original.” Two turntables are not allowed.
