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Notes Turntable.fm: Improve Your Algorithms or Songza Will Drink your Milkshake
The primary product of Turntable.fm (TT) is the curated music stream and that product is currently inferior to competitors such as Songza. The secondary product of providing a venue for aspiring DJs is often deleterious to the primary product by lowering the quality of the curated playlist. Nearly as bad, mediocre DJs prevent the quality of curated music from reaching its full potential.
To be successful Turntable.fm can’t just be crowdsourced music curation, it needs to be functionally meritocratic.
If TT can successfully provide a venue for aspiring DJs and keep a consistently high level of curation quality it could still meet its goals and beat its competitors.
Ideally the UX/UI would be entirely redesigned integrally with a rework of the reputation system, however even with the UI almost entirely unchanged a few tweaks to the algorithms and system could help TT become viable again.
Here are a few quick thoughts on algorithm design principles and some basic implementation suggestions:
Consistent Quality: Minimize Troll and Amateur DJs
- DJs next play is locked 60 seconds before it plays, which DJs on deck can see. If 2 of 4 DJs on deck downvote before it plays that song is skipped. If their 2nd choice is also voted down their play is skipped and they take a hit to their DJ score. When a play isn’t vetoed the voting DJs have their DJ score affected by the outcome of the play.
- All rooms have minimum DJ scores and/or room-admin nominated DJs.
Improved Identification of Pro DJs- Convert DJ score from an absolute accumulation of points to a dynamic score such as between 1 and 100.
- DJ score unique to room.
- Heart/Lame/Awesome/ ratio becomes primary DJ score determinant.
- New/low-score DJs in the audience can virtually DJ: higher ranking DJs can see their next play selection and up/down vote it to affect their score.
- Multilevel marketing! Seriously, hear me out: Higher level DJs that positively rate picks from a lower ranking DJs that then goes on to become a higher ranking DJ will also raise the score of the DJ that identified their talent. And have their scores hurt if they support a DJ that goes on to be a dud or troll.
These suggestions would change the nature of TT but if they were well balanced they could encourage vetting without enforcing conformity, improve the overall quality of the music, and make the social interaction even more fun and interesting.
Ultimately TT DJs make the primary TT product and unless that product is solid TT will fail. In many ways these sorts of changes would transform TT from a crowdsource system to a collective intelligence system.