Turntable.fm Goes Legit with Licensing Agreements with the Major Labels
By Karla Robinson
March 15, 2012
March 15, 2012
- Social music service Turntable.fm has reached licensing agreements with Warner, Universal, EMI and Sony, allowing the site to stream music legally.
- The announcement was made this week by Turntable.fm founder Billy Chasen and co-founder Seth Goldstein during a South By Southwest panel.
- Less than a year old, Turntable.fm saw 207,000 unique Web-based visitors in its first full month, but hasn’t driven as much traffic since. “Of course, the comScore numbers don’t include mobile, which is a recent area of growth for Turntable.fm since it launched an iPhone app in September,” notes The Hollywood Reporter.
- Compared with Pandora’s 17.4 million visitors in one month, the service is still relatively small — but Stephen Bryan, Warner’s VP of digital strategy and business development says the site has the potential to raise revenue.
- “We see it as a sort of funnel to attract more lean-back customers into the digital space and figure out how to monetize them over time,” he told Billboard.biz.
- “This feels like an all-time record speed launch — when we launched we really didn’t come at this from the music industry, it was all new to us,” said Goldstein. “Our model is unique — we’re not a radio service, not an on-demand service. We have interesting aspects that really require some out-of-the-box thinking. We felt that from the get-go the labels were absolutely different from what I’d been led to believe. They gave us a lot of time and attention. Compared to their user base, we’re a tiny service in the broad scheme of things.”
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