"The reason Turntable didn’t work is because the music industry is expensive and hard to work with and takes a lot of time, money and energy just to be in compliance," he says. He pivoted to launch Turntable.fm, a unique social product that resembled a virtual dance floor with DJs and earned plenty of press before it shuttered in 2014.Ī screenshot from the final day that Turntable was available publicly. In 2008, he made an app for live-chatting on web pages, realized it was going nowhere and scrambled to transform the tool into Chartbeat, an analytics service that taunts media publishers to this day.Ī few years later, Chasen made a barcode scanning service called StickyBits, got lots of funding for it only to realize it didn't have legs. You go back to the drawing board.Ĭhasen has been in this position more than most. This is what happens after you've come up with the flashy idea, been called the star of the all-important SXSW tech gathering, raised millions in funding, attracted millions of users, only to watch the company die. This is the other side of innovation, the less-discussed part. "It's trying to make a social, public voice chatroom." "I keep coming back to how can we do things in real-time together, which is very similar to Turntable," he says, before distilling the pitch for Blockparty. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because the idea is basically Turntable.fm with a focus on voices instead of music.
#TURNTABLE FM CODE#
(You can try out the app with the code "Mashable.") The app's emphasis and differentiator is supposed to be the intimacy and power of human voices over text.
The example he loves: People stuck in the same traffic jam might find a room about it based on their location data and can start venting out loud to each other as they drive. The app is intended to be a virtual gathering spot for friends or strangers. Chasen finally wants to show off the new app he's been working on for months and is excited about: Blockparty. "Some of those may have already been sunsetted," he says, using Silicon Valley's elegant euphemism for failure.īut that's not why we're here, in a virtual chat room with my company's name on it and our faces popping like bubbles threatening to burst as we listen to each other's voices. "What were the other ones we listed on there?" Chasen asks when I bring up his website listing " active projects" he's working on. And Aska, for getting verified lawyers, doctors, carpenters, whoever to answer your random questions. There's Halfie, for sending half-selfies to people with the goal of having someone else fill in the other half with their own.
Billy Chasen can't keep track of all the apps he's made in the last two years since Turntable.fm, his once trendy social music startup, shut down for good.