ComScore suggests Turntable.fm attracted 207k unique users in July. After the hype comes… well, not quite a backlash, but perhaps a bump back down to earth. Hotly-tippped social music service Turntable.fm attracted 207,000 unique visitors in July according to comScore. That’s below some previous estimates – we’ve seen talk of 400,000 monthly active users for the service, which only launched a couple of months ago. Another possible cause for concern: one of the sources for those higher figures, AppData, claims that Turntable.fm’s users have actually been declining since mid-July, while the Google Trends analytics service reveals searches for Turntable.fm by US internet users have halved since late June. A flash in the pan? It’s too early to tell, but it will be important for Turntable.fm to make the right moves now to keep its buzz going.
Source: Billboard Like what you’ve read here? For a free two week trial of Music Ally, sign up here. Turntable.fm. We finally got around to announcing our investment in Turntable.fm. I wrote this on the USV blog today: Sometimes you end up loving something you don't want to. When turntable.fm launched, I wanted to avoid it. There was the Facebook login button that I didn't want to use. There was another music service I didn't want to add to my already-exhaustive collection. And then there was the matter of Seth and Billy, who may have the distinction of getting more "no thanks" from me than any other pair of entrepreneurs in the world.
But the service kept coming after me. So one day in late June or early July, I finally hit that Facebook login and took a tour of turntable. One of the worst kept secrets in startupland is that Union Square Ventures has led a round of financing for turntable.fm. Billy Chasen is one of the most talented web entrepreneurs I've met. Seth Goldstein is one of the first web entrepreneurs I ever met, back in NYC in the mid 90s.
Turntable.fm Closes That $7 Million Round, Fred Wilson Joins Board. The line of investors trying to press their way into Turntable.fm‘s latest round of funding was appropriately similar to the line outside a crankin’ dance club: a mix of money and celebrity. And not everybody could get in. But the funding finally closed, and it came in at $7 million, half a million less than the amount “confirmed” by Business Insider in July. Turntable had offers on the table for twice as much money, but they really wanted Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures to lead the round. Wilson will take a board seat. The other investors include the original investors in Turntable’s predecessor company, Stickybits: First Round Capital, Polaris Venture Partners, and Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital.
Some celebrities and entertainment executives also got into the round, such as Lady Gaga’s manager Troy Carter, Madonna’s manager Guy Oseary, Jimmy Fallon, band members from the Roots, former MySpace Music president Courtney Holt, and former Facebook exec Tim Kendall. Turntable.fm Is About To Rock An iPhone App; We Have Screenshots. For the past few months, few things on the web have been hotter than Turntable.fm. The Stickybits pivot got so hot, so fast, that a “trough of disillusionment” was inevitable — and we’ve probably been seeing that the past couple of weeks. But something is coming very shortly that should supercharge the service once again: an iPhone app.
Yes, it was both obvious and inevitable that Turntable.fm would go mobile. But we’ve managed to obtain some details — and most importantly, screenshots. We’re told that the company is hoping to release the app next week. As you can see, they’ve done a great job moving the look and feel of the app over to mobile. No word on an Android app at this point. The New Early-Adopter Addiction: Turntable. Editor’s Note: This guest post written by former TechCrunch writer Steve Poland (@popo).
His last post was Twitter And Facebook Turn Everyone Into An Affiliate Marketer. Signing up for Twitter at South by Southwest 2007, I can remember those feelings of “Wow, this is going to be big.” That instant feeling of knowing you’re seeing the future and the world doesn’t even have a clue yet. It’d be years before my friends would finally take the leap and get their own Twitter accounts (even if I knew Twitter usernames in 2007 were like domain names in 1995).
There have been other services I’ve thought would be big, but only one other time in the past four years have I been awe-struck. The third magical “wow” moment just happened this week, and it’s Turntable.fm. I’m an avid music listener. Turntable is a game changer. The only issue I thought Turntable had was needing to deal with the record labels, but it appears they are licensing the streaming catalog thru MediaNet.