Some days people can send you links to some of the craziest things. Today it was Turntable.fm. This isn't your regular Internet radio site. You actually get to pick the songs you want to play. As with most things that sound too good to be true, there is a catch.
The way it works is that there are chat rooms with 5 DJs spinning. Each DJ is a person playing a song they have uploaded from whatever genre or style the chat room is. Once the song is over, the spotlight moves to the next DJ. So on and so forth. A "Like or Lame" meter at the bottom of the screen can judge a DJ's choice of music along with the chat log on the right side of the screen and the movement of the avatars.
Speaking of Avatars, the more fans and DJ points you receive, the better avatars you can choose from. Everyone starts off with choices of dorky boys and girls avatars. From there it moves up various Hello Kitty-esque avatars and random characters from Cartoon Network, it seems. The highest ranking DJs I noticed had Deadmau5 as an avatar.
Music choices are all over the place. From various forms of dubstep all the way to country music and around indie rock. Folks are now bound by only the rooms listed. You can create your own. A Conquer Entertainment DJ Room in the near future would be pretty cool.
A couple things you should know: Turntable.fm is still in "beta" which means there are kinks and glitches with the site that the developers are working on. But while they are fixing it, you get to play on the site. The site also doesn't work well with Internet Explorer so now is the time to try Firefox, Chrome or Safari as a web browser. Getting selected to be a DJ relies upon the speed of your index finger. Because there is no actual "que" for picking who goes next, although some rooms do have their own selection process.
However, with being able to create your own room to play your own music, this is definitely a way for independent artists to get their music out there without leaving the house.
Turntable.fm
*Image from CNN.com
5 tips for spinning on the addictive Turntable.fm
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