Once upon a time, I was an avid user of Turntable.fm. To me, it was way better than Pandora at getting me through a work day. Real people were picking the songs. Everyone was hanging out, chatting about the tunes, or chatting about anything else, really. I have a lot of fond and strange stories from that website. I met Bill Cowher’s daughter there! So it holds a special place in my heart.
The screenshot you see above? That is actually one I took myself of Turntable on my own Android tablet in July 2011.
Turntable.fm sadly shut down in 2013 because, well, of course it did. It was a music website that wasn’t really paying the music industry, and that never ends well. So imagine my surprise when I read a story on TechCrunch today that Turntable.fm just raised $7.5 million to come back to life. Could it be? Could we finally have this nice thing to use once more?
According to Turntable.fm’s founder, Billy Chasen, the website has actually been live again since March thanks to “community support” via Patreon. With this funding, that Patreon is being shutdown, and Turntable.fm is now looking to hire engineers and designers.
At the moment, the site is password protected, presumably to keep traffic manageable. I sure hope it opens to all comers in the very near future, however. I feel like a little piece of me has been missing since Turntable.fm went away. (There was some sort of mixtape site I really liked, too, but I forget the name of it and can’t find a trace of it online now.)
When the word gets out about Turntable.fm unleashing its service onto the masses, we’ll let you know.
