Like some of you over the last couple of month I have found a new internet addiction…turntable.fm. Being a on and off again club DJ for the last 10 years, I was a bit skeptical about the site, spending hours dropping my favorite tracks to see if my musical taste could serenade the electronic music snob hordes. I had a few misses and a few big wins that first night, but in the end I was hooked. Alas, this is not an opinion or how-to blog post about turntable.fm. This is a SwellPath blog post, and I’m going to focus on the one common cord with everything we do here, THE DATA. But, if you haven’t used turntable.fm and you’re interested in more details, please read this very informative post before continuing.
A few hours into my first session at turntable.fm I was utterly fascinated with the data the boys at Stickybits were collecting. Not only are they getting an obscene amount of music uploads, they asre tracking listening habits, music ratings, genre popularity and God knows what else through FB connect (I didn’t read the terms, did you?) from people around the WORLD. The best part was all of this data was not through survey’s or prompts, the game, app or whatever this new thing is itself just produces it on it’s own. Using a beautiful mix of crowd sourcing and game mechanics, they are recording true , un-solicited feedback by a self-segmented random population. For you stats folks out there I think this is possibly the most potent and statistically relevant data you can get, right? Where is this data though? They probably have it under lock and key I bet. I can only imagine how many music related firms would love to get their hands on this data in the pure form. Luckily for people like me, there are plenty of developers out there who love to use “scraping tools” to get this data and are creative enough to create applications to satisfy these needs. For turntable.fm the app is called … ttdashboard.com.
TTdashboard.com is credited as being created by @alain_gilbert and I give him major props for putting a site like this together. It already brings a lot of cool real-time reporting features starting of course…with a dashboard. Like most dashboards, it shows high level data like who the top DJ’s are in terms of points and fans, the most played song (I think this feed still has some bugs), and actually a pretty accurate update of the top 6 rooms with a display of the current song and its ranking in the room. Personally, I dig the fact that you can actually see the number of negative votes, which is not visible information in turntable.fm interface for some reason. Personally, I didn’t find the dashboard to interesting, but as I dug into the site I found the deeper pages much more fulfilling.
The Room Detail Page
When you dive into a room detail page, you have a long listing of the tracks that we’re played, with the likes and dislikes for songs. You also get a decent data visualization example, a trending line graph showing room occupancy over the last day. Sadly, data visualization only looks at the current day and not over the life time of the room. I think a couple of data visuals showing time peaks and visitors over the lifetime for the room would have been far more compelling. A lot of work can still be done on this page, so let’s see where it goes from here.
The Profile Page
The profile page has the least amount of functionality right now, but I think the most potential for tracking great data points. Currently it’s only has your avatar, current fan and points total unless the system has tracked you. Again I’m not sure how this is tracked, but the ability to categorize song’s you have liked and not liked to revisit later for possible purchase would be an awesome feature. I personally have gone through hours on Turntable.fm and kicked myself later for not documenting a song I liked to look up later. I also would love the ability to easily access DJ’s who I have fanned to see what tracks they have been playing to be better prepared for my next turntable battle.
The Song Page
My favorite page is the song details page, which can be accessed by either typing in your favorite song into the search bar or just clicking on a song title from any page. The ability to see the aggregate of likes and dislikes for a song is sweet, but since ttdashboard.com only tracks the most popular rooms right now, the data they show is just the tip of the iceberg of what is probably available. This is where I could see showing some really great visualizations around likes and dislikes, or play frequency. I’d be interested to see some dynamic comparison graphs that show how songs fair across different rooms, in particular if certain songs are generally favored across all rooms, not just their specific genre. Again, we’ll see where this goes, my fingers are crossed.
I’m really interested in where the information on turntable.fm can take us. I can already see the potential for great global and regional visualizations based on music genres, or maybe a real time trending music graph showing the top 10 hottest songs on the site that could be adjusted by time. The amount of the global music insights you can get if turntable could get to the size of a twitter or facebook are really astounding if you think about it. Beyond this I have already tried to prompt my DJ and music producer friends to use this as a vehicle to get their songs noticed. If anybody out there knows how Mr. @alain_gilbert is pulling this info or better yet you have access to some real data from turntable,fm, I would love to hear from you and your ideas about what we could do with this amazing data. You can usually find me spinning some house music in an electronic music room, under my DJ alter ego Anton Loshe.
Summer is almost here, that means time for camping season! WordCamp season that is. Several good WordCamps in the next few months, including 
