How to describe describe Truntable.fm… Remember how we showed you how to tweet your current song so others could enjoy what you were playing on your Zune? Remember how that evolved into Zune Tune playlists where your suggestions were compiled into playlists others could download? Think of Turntable.fm as a live Zune Tune playlist. This is a website that allows you to listen to music picked by other individuals, live. At its core Turntable.fm represents an interesting take on the idea of social music listening and sharing.

Turntable.fm is still in a private alpha phase, meaning you can only get access if you have an invite or a Facebook friend who was already invited. Fortunately I had the latter. Once inside you are in the lobby, a list of rooms that lead to music. Some rooms have categories like, Old School Hip-Hop or Coding Soundtrack. Other rooms seem to belong to companies like Foursquare, Twitter-HQ and Zynga. Your friends are shown in different rooms in a separate column to the right of the room titles.

In a room there are up to 5 DJ spots and an apparently limitless number of listener spots. I have seen 125 people “cram” into a singe room. As a DJ you are responsible for coming up with the music everyone in the room will hear. If you want, you can upload your own tracks. Instead of playing a full set, you play one track at a time and then pass off the DJing responsibility to the next person on stage. As a song plays everyone has the option to provide feedback as to whether the current track is ‘awesome’ or ‘lame.’ Too many ‘lame’ votes and the song gets skipped. As more people like the tracks you play you get DJ points. You can use DJ points to upgrade your avatar. If people like you enough they can choose to become your fanl. Generally people play old school hip hop, electronica (house & dubstep), and underground remixes. I have discovered quite a few remixes and gotten a little deeper into dubstep as a result of the site. To that end, Zune Pass, Smart DJ, and Mixview have helped in serving up a number number of tracks I have DJed as well as in downloading new artists and songs I have not heard before.

Thinking about social music listening experiences I think turntable.fm is up there. It provides something that has been missing in the Zune Tune experience, a live component. The fact that songs are being played while listeners have the ability to provide immediate feedback, as a group, is something I have not seen before. In reading some of the chatter in the rooms – each room provides a chat wall- MuMu Player came up as a similar service. I have not used MuMu Player, so I cannot speak for the site. Others have noted Turntable.fm beats out iTunes’ Ping service.Hip Hop artist, Max Tannone, known for mashup albums such as Mos Dub and Jaydiohead (on which Jay-Z liked a few tracks) has played some of his tracks on Turntable.fm to positive crowd reviews. When I asked him if he has released new tracks on the site, he said it was “an awesome idea.” Aside from discovering music you might not have not heard before (or in 10 years) Turntable.fm can be a platform for artists to launch new tracks. Such an idea highlights one of the potential uses for this site. This live social music listening experience can enable an artist to play their work in a more conversational setting with fans that are not necessarily local. Thanks to the immediate feedback of voting and the chat walls in each room, users can tell an artist if their tracks sink or swim right away. Though such a conversational setting might get out of hand as room crowds grow larger.

The site is not without its faults. There are times where the site will show the wrong DJ order at the DJ table, play an incorrect track from your queue, or fail to play any music at all (it is pre-beta). A simple refresh of the current page fixes these problems, though you will loose your position at the DJ table if you were serving up tunes. Still, Turntable.fm is definitely worth checking out. So much so that sometime tonight I will be spinning some tunes online. I should be in the Turntable.fm Zune room on Truntable.fm if you are my Facebook friend and want to stop by.