Turntable.fm Releases iPhone App

Breakout music-sharing startup Turntable.fm released its much anticipated iPhone app today. Turntable.fm is a social music service, with a DJ-twist.

From Gizmodo's thorough explanation of the service:

Turntable is a musical chat room. You like talking to your friends. You like playing your favorite songs. You like hearing good songs you didn't pick. Turntable puts all of these nice things into one cartoonish online dance floor. Five DJs at a time queue up tracks of their choosing, while everyone else sits back and enjoys. Or doesn't enjoy! If a dud comes on, the audience can vote it off the speakers with enough dislike clicks. Or if a DJ's playing good stuff, you can reward them with likes, which translate into points, which are worn around as a badge of distinguished taste.

The service, which intentionally slowed its growth by only allowing in users who had Facebook friends already in the service, has now opened up to anyone with a Facebook account.

The iPhone app, released today, completely replicates the desktop experience.

You can create your own Turntable.fm rooms, or start DJing within a current room, right from within the app.

[...]

For an initial release, the app is reasonably polished. Everything takes a bit longer than the desktop version of Turntable.fm — like joining new rooms, or creating a room — but the fact that it works at all is amazing. Surprisingly, it even works well over 3G, although music switching and room joining suffers even more delays because of it.

Turntable.fm is available free on the App Store. Users need a Facebook account to use the service. [iTunes]