Tony Hadley will be chuffed: ‘Gold’ is becoming the word of choice for digital music services launching a premium tier to upsell free users to. We wrote about Dhingana Gold earlier this month (Bulletin, 11-Jul-13), and now it’s the turn of Turntable.fm to get its precious-metal on. The US streaming service has launched Turntable Gold, which gives paying users extra features including “sweet new avatars, great new chat and laptop stickers, and the ability to add images and GIFs right in chat”. And before you scoff, remember that digital stickers are proving to be one of the more lucrative elements of the app economy in 2013, so trying them in a web-based music service isn’t a ridiculous notion. “The best part is you can name your price for all of these lovely features, for a limited time only,” explains Turntable’s blog post – a pay-what-you-like model rather than a set monthly subscription. The news came alongside the launch of a new ‘Miniplayer’ for Turntable, which ditches the service’s signature virtual rooms (or, at least, the visuals of the virtual rooms) in favour of a standard music player. How much impact will these changes have? In November 2012, Turntable said it had more than 1.2m registered users, but according to social analytics site AppData, it has less than 50k active users who’ve connected it to their Facebook accounts, down from 400k at its peak in 2011.
Source: Turntable.fm
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