Instant Community on Turntable.fm

I’ve recently had to reevaluate my thinking about online communities.

This change of heart came about through my experience with the terrific new music sharing service Turntable.fm.

Turnable.fm lets users create or join listening “rooms” where up to five users can be the DJ’s, taking turns playing songs. Everyone in the room can rate a song “lame” or “awesome.” DJs earn a point every time a song they play gets an “awesome” rating.  A chat session lets users communicate with one another.

So what does this have to do with online community management?

Generally speaking, participants in healthy online communities have these attributes:

  1. They coalesce around a shared interest (e.g. knitting)
  2. They agree on a common goal (e.g. sharing knitting tips and patterns)
  3. They agree on what constitutes acceptable conduct within the community (e.g. we don’t talk about needlepoint here)

Communities like this take time to develop. But the Turntable.fm listening rooms I’ve seen are essentially instant communities that behave like established ones.

The people in these rooms have a shared interest. If you join the folk room, for instance, you are joining a community of people that share your interest in folk music.

Everybody in these rooms is there to discover new music and/or share the music they love with others — an instant shared goal.

Acceptable conduct in this context means playing appropriate music. The tools and gamifcation features of the site take care of that. Play Bon Jovi in the punk room, and you will surely (hopefully) be ridiculed and perhaps booted from the room (the DJ that starts the room has the power to kick others out). Play music that others in the room like, you’re rewarded with points that can be used to get a cooler avatar. Play songs people rate as “lame” and the room skips ahead to the next DJ’s song.

In addition to these built-in features, people have come up with clever rules and games. There are often several “one and done” rooms where DJs give up their spots after playing a single song. As I write this, I’m listening to a “connect the songs” room where each song has to have a connection to the previous one (Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust” was followed up by “Dust In The Wind” by Kansas).

Turntable.fm lets people make connections through music that simply aren’t possible through a service like Spotify or Pandora. The other day I was in a room and heard a song I really liked from a band I had never heard of before. In the chat session, I mentioned how much I was enjoying the song and the DJ replied “Rad! That’s my band!” and provided a link to download more of their music.

Are Turntable.fm rooms a new kind of online community? Do you agree that these ad hoc communities behave a lot like established ones? Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Photo credit: marcy0414

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