Betabeat was just settling down for some refreshing key lime pie and Vint Cerf’s new inspirational autobiography, ICANN and so Can You!, when we received an after-hours email from Turntable.fm co-founder Billy Chasen.
“Thanks for writing and also showing us a vulnerability in user’s violating our terms with music downloading. I’ve fixed it so that the download script does not work anymore,” wrote Chasen.
He was referring to a Betabeat post from earlier this week about all the mischief script kiddies who have hacking on Turntable.fm.
The team has enough trouble just keeping the servers up, and has been working overtime to fix vulnerabilities as they appear. Letting users download tracks is a big no-no for a service that needs to keep the music labels on its good side.
Chasen wouldn’t say much more, but Betabeat has learned from sources that, in its first month open to the public, Turntable.fm has passed 140,000 active users.
The company had to throttle back the number of new users who can join. It’s on a 24/7 hunt for new engineers, working the Ace Hotel late into the night, with investor Chris Sacca and magician David Blaine making appearances alongside Turntable.fm founder Seth Goldstein.
“Every VC in town wants to get in,” said a local investor. “But the murky legal questions around music rights do remain.” Right now users can upload tracks from their collection, or draw on Turntable.fm’s library, which is provided by Medianet. Turntable.fm pays fees to Sound Exchange and publishers on every track played.
