Turntable Spins 6.5 Million New Songs, But Can it Defeat the Spotify Hype Machine?

Turntable.fm has added another 6.5 million songs to its collection of streams, adding to the 1.25 million it added earlier in the week, according to Betabeat.

This is great news, as anyone who has used Turntable will tell you, the service rocks. It is a great way to share and discover new music with friends, strangers, and the occasional enemy (I'm looking at you, Joel!).

Unfortunately, Turntable's arrival comes at a time when the world is buzzing for Spotify. And it's easy to see why: despite my disdain for a cloud-only universe (contrary to popular belief, not everything should be stored on a galaxy far, far away), and despite my concern that Spotify was trying to force users to pay for the premium service, I have since become a fan.

Spotify delivers exactly what it claims: all the music (not just your music) in one place, allowing freebie users to stream it on any PC, and allowing premium users to stream it on a wide variety of devices. It's a tantalizing offering that few music lovers will be able to resist.

While the world is certainly big enough for both Spotify and Turntable (which are two drastically different services) to thrive, people only have two ears, and we only have the capacity to listen to one song at a time. While Turntable is great for playtime, Spotify is the service that people will regularly turn to for musical satisfaction. That, and the insurmountable hype that has led up to and followed the service's launch in America, could overshadow Turntable's success.

But let's hope not. While Spotify is merely another, more expensive version of something we've had for years, Turntable is unlike any other music website out there.

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