Social-music-discovery slash DJ-app Turntable.fm has just announced at SXSW that it now has licensing deals with all four major record labels which means that its service will be around for quite some time, as it has now gone legit.
During Turntable.fm CEO Seth Goldstein’s panel “Turntable.FM: The Future of Music Is Social”, he announced that the ink was dry on the deals with Warner, EMI, Sony, and Universal.
According to Billboard, Goldstein suggests that since launching Turntable.fm nine months ago, this has been a learning process:
This feels like an all-time record speed launch – when we launched we really didn’t come at this from the music industry, it was all new to us. Our model is unique – we’re not a radio service, not an on-demand service. We have interesting aspects that really require some out-of-the-box thinking. We felt that from the get-go the labels were absolutely different from what I’d been led to believe. They gave us a lot of time and attention. Compared to their user base, we’re a tiny service in the broad scheme of things.
It appears that the record labels loved the idea of gamifying music discovery and see Turntable’s potential to turn a profit and become a place where artists can launch new music.
The app has a unique experience that allows anyone to become a DJ and lets the community decide on whether they like the tracks they hear by giving it a thumbs up or down. The DJ gets points based on how popular they are on the service which brings them back to share more music, of course.
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Turntable.fm has even made chatting fun again by letting people talk to each other in a little chatbox, which usually turns into a trash-talking fest about what song is playing at the time.
In addition to amazing social features that engage its community, Turntable.fm links songs to places like iTunes which lets user purchase the track that they hear. It’s a great model and now that everything is legit with the record labels I’m sure we’ll see some killer new features.
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