So, Turntable.fm is shutting down. We all saw it coming I suppose, but the reality is still sad. I’m not going to get into the why’s and what if’s that others have so eloquently put into words. Instead I’d like to speak of what this site meant to me personally and most especially my Connect The Songs family. I call them family because that’s what we’ve become. Like all families we have fights and drama, tediousness and tensions. But under all of that is the love and passion we all shared for music.
I first found out about Turntable.fm from reading a news feed in August of 2011. I thought it sounded intriguing, so I went to check it out. What a strange, wonderful, and quite frankly scary place! There were so many rooms! 80s rooms. 90s rooms. Hard rock rooms. Theme rooms. Top 40 rooms. Jpop! I love Jpop! How the hell was I supposed to figure this out? I remember the nervousness I felt the very first time I got on deck in a room. What do I do? Will they like my song? How do I upload music? What’s a bop? It was so exciting! And there was chat. This was a totally new experience for me. Why the hell would I want to chat with complete strangers online? Isn’t that what pedophiles and stalkers do? There’s NO WAY I’m doing this! I’ll just play my songs and lurk in the background. But then I played my song, people liked it. They told me “nice spin” and “I have this album, love it!” Well of course I had to respond to these comments. Three hours later and countless conversations about artists, songs, and memories the music invoked, I knew I was hooked.
The driving force behind Turntable was the community. It’s not necessarily the first thing that one might think of when thinking about a music site. Once I found a home in Connect the Songs, I found people that were so into music. Bands and genres I’d never heard of came up constantly. Most were so knowledgeable about their favorite genre. This is what led me to finding (and buying) new music. I will forever be grateful to these people for not only exposing me to new music, but for reminding me of songs and artists that I had completely forgotten. My music IQ has grown exponentially as a direct result of chatting and listening to music on Turntable.fm, which is perhaps the saddest part of it. Though there will be new sites and different ways to experience music online, for me TT was the first, and your first is always special.
I’d like to close by saying I’ve made some lifelong friends through Turntable.fm. There are some truly generous souls in the world, and I count myself lucky to have encountered some online. I’d like to thank one person in particular that made this site so very special. When I first started coming in to CTS (as we call it), all of us were having a discussion about video games. I made a remark about how I wanted to play a particular game, but that I didn’t really have the money to buy it. Josh Wessel (J_Dubb), not knowing me from Adam offered to loan me the money to buy this game. I hadn’t been a regular in this room for all that long, and yet he offers to loan me $60 to buy a game. Since then, he has demonstrated his generosity time and again in various forms. Yet that one simple gesture he made to me, a complete stranger, has stuck with me to this day. For friends like this, I will always think of my time on Turntable.fm as magical and wondrous.
Chad Ito aka chadtz!/badtz!/badtzninja
Please leave your TT stories below in the cooments. We’d all love to hear them.
I discovered cts at the beginning of the summer. Spent a lot of time there and met some cool people. Life intervened this fall and I haven’t been around much, but I am sad to hear it s all coming to an end.
Rats? Ihaterats!
There is no Connect room on Plug.dj Bots will work there. You would be really successful over there. I moved House of Rock & Metal over and could not believe the success we achieved right from the start.
Hey, we ARE on plug! Been there for a while now! Stop by and spin!