Ever wonder how super angel and man-about-town Chris Sacca spends his Friday nights? Well, right now you can find him at Turntable.fm, a stealthy, you-can-only-get-in-if-you-know-someone online DJ party. I just stumbled onto it by accident. You can only gain entry if you are Facebook friends with someone already inside.
As it happens, I knew some people. Turntable.fm is a project of Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen, the two guys who brought us Stickybits. You enter and there are different DJ rooms to choose from. There are probably 25 people there right now (this is still in private alpha). But in one room called “Let’s rock old-ish hip-hop,” there was Sacca, Goldstein, YouTube’s Hunter Walk, and Mike Marquez of CODE Advisors. Sacca was playing “Push It” by Salt-n-Pepa, up on the DJ platform (he gets to wear the space helmet because he has a lot of points, which are awarded to him by other people in the room who like what he plays).
Everyone in a room has an avatar and can chat with each other. You can create your own playliist and get up on the DJ table to battle it out. People tend to talk a lot of smack. But it’s fun, and addictive enough that I didn’t leave after 20 seconds. Turntable.fm needs a lot of fine-tuning (in fact a lot of the chat was about features it coud use, such as better animations for the avatars or different ways to award points.
In the end, Turntable.fm is really about hanging out with people and discovering music. If a DJ is playing a song you like, you can add it to your playlist, buy it on iTunes, findi it on Last.fm, or launch Spotify.
