- Turntable.fm returns as Hangouts, a collaborative music app
- Create your own virtual space for music sharing
- You and your friends can take turns to DJ
From flared jeans to fascism, it’s a well-known fact that if you hang around long enough everything old comes back again. And if you remember turntable.fm, the collaborative streaming music platform of the early 2010s, you’ll get a flash of déjà vu when you look at the newly launched Hangout. It looks and works very much like turntable.fm, and that’s no bad thing. (And just to clarify, this is nothing to with Google Hangouts, which closed its virtual doors in November 2022).
The idea behind Hangout is simple: you create your own personal space, which is called a Hangout, and you and your friends can then take turns being the DJ. There are over 100 million officially licensed tracks to choose from, and you can take part from multiple platforms: your web browser, your iOS device or your Android device.
What’s different from turntable.fm?
Hangouts comes from Turntable Labs, a spin-off from the original Turntable.fm. That service suffered from one big problem when it launched: it had no official deals in place with any record labels, so operated within a gray area that limited what it could do. Instead of getting licenses from the record companies, it claimed to be a non-interactive radio station, which meant you couldn’t play your own choice of music if you were the only person in the room and only US residents could use it. It did sign licences in 2012 with four major music labels, but the site shut down the following year.
Hangout clearly doesn’t want to repeat that history, hence the licenses being in place from the get-go. But with former Turntable.fm VP of technology Joseph Perla at the helm, it clearly hopes to recapture the magic of the original without any of the other issues. However, it also has a rival – and that too has a turntable.fm connection, as it is run by former turntable CEO, Billy Chasen. That one’s called deepcut.fm, and it’s a rebranded (and very retro-looking) version of turntable.fm.
As interesting as the history is, what really matters is whether anybody’s going to use it – and music collaboration has changed somewhat since Turntable’s heyday. Apple’s SharePlay, Spotify Live and other similar services already offer collaborative listening, and while they don’t have Hangouts’ cutesy interface, they do already have established customer bases.
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