Etiquette! Being a website that puts your avatar face-to-face with avatars which represent other live people with musical tastes that may be different from your own, as it were, Turntable.fm has the potential to cause social anxiety approaching that of the nonsense peer pressure and relationship-status dilemmas that goes down on Facebook. Luckily, Chicago-based founder-with-a-blog Daniel Honigman put together a list of do’s and don’t’s to help you navigate this brave new landscape.
“Skip your outros, if they’re long,” he advises. “Be cognizant of the fact that not everyone wants to hear the outro–in fact, there’s a good chance nobody wants to–and skip it.”
“Don’t click ‘Lame’ unless you absolutely HAVE to,” he says. “There are two reasons, really, for ‘Lame-ing’ a song: if the song is inconsistent with the room’s theme, or if the DJ playing it is away from the computer. Otherwise, just hit ‘mute’ and play something else. Either way, especially don’t lame at the very beginning of the song, as DJ Woooo said in this CNN article.”
Sound advice to keep things civil! We’ve noticed things can get heated–especially when it comes to whether a track being played in the “Indie While You Work” room is actually “indie”–around the divisive topic of whether a song is lame or awesome. There’s only thing arguably more divisive to Turntable users, and that’s jockeying for a DJ spot. Here Mr. Honigman advises something every elementary school student learns in the cafeteria. “Don’t cut the line,” he says. “In the more popular rooms on turntable.fm, there’s usually a DJ list. To find it, click the “Room Info” button towards the top of the page. (The list is usually a Google doc.) If you want to DJ, get your name on there, and stick around.”
