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Turntable.fm founder muses on company closure

By | Published on Thursday 20 March 2014

Turntable.fm

Having finally accepted defeat and closed down Turntable.fm, co-founder Billy Chasen has written a blog post reflecting on his four years trying to establish the service.

As previously reported, the briefly very buzzy online DJing website struggled after trying to gain licences from labels and publishers, those pesky music companies feeling they should get some money from a service entirely based on the content they paid for the creation of.

In a bid to placate the rights owners, access to Turntable.fm was locked to the US only, after which the company gradually shut down various features as it struggled to make any of them pay. Then last year it was announced that the core website was closing down altogether, and instead the company would focus on a pay-per-view service featuring exclusive sessions by bands. But that last project was shut down in January as well, and now the company is gone altogether, writes Chase.

“Ultimately, I didn’t heed the lessons of so many failed music startups”, he said. “It’s an incredibly expensive venture to pursue and a hard industry to work with. We spent more than a quarter of our cash on lawyers, royalties and services related to supporting music. It’s restrictive. We had to shut down our growth because we couldn’t launch internationally. It’s a long road. It took years to get label deals in place and it also took months of engineering time to properly support them (time which could have been spent on product)”.

Read Chasen’s full blog post here.



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