I entered into the room. It was dark and frenetic. House and electro dance tunes roared as I watched the densely packed crowd listen to the music. I squeezed in among the participants, and worked up my courage to ask a question.

"I would like to speak to DJ Wooooo, please," I said.

My query was ignored. I waited a little longer and asked again. More silence, then...

"Anyone know any songs with a poem or someone talking at beginning?" someone next to me asked the group. "C'mon, only 100 more of you need to bop to get me to 1k!" another exclaimed.

These remarks threw me off for a minute, then I tried once more. "DJ Wooooo. How can I meet this person?" I reiterated. Three times turned out to be the charm.

He's one of the developers i think," a participant named djicon explained. "Nah, Wooooo isn't a dev," another named SeXAppeal insisted. "He was just one of the first ones on here."

Indeed he was. I wanted to talk to DJ Woooo because he is the reining star of Turntable.fm, with more points and more fans than anyone else. Turntable is not a club or a bar, it's an online matrix of rooms where tens of thousands of users share music uploaded to a database and chat about it, or about anything else. The site may also represent a breakthrough in the evolution of broadcasting, as significant as freeform FM was in the 1960s. By giving the power of music choice to clusters of human beings rather than to genomes, turntable.fm rescues the spontaneity that was mid-20th century music radio and effectively brings it to the 'Net.

I looked at the chat line on my room screen. Somebody posted DJ Wooooo's Twitter page. "Thanks," I typed. "np," came the reply. I sent Wooooo a message with my phone number. The next day I received a call at exactly 7:15 AM.

"Hi, Matthew?" the voice said. "This is Ethan. DJ Wooooo."

I was lucky

I asked for Ethan's family name, but he didn't want to say. "Ethan has been working for me so far," he explained. "Let's leave it at that."

Ethan didn't develop turntable.fm—that honor goes to Seth Goldstein of StickyBits and Billy Chasen. But he describes himself as a startup entrepreneur with about twelve years of piano lessons behind him. Ethan was reluctant to share much more personal data, but I came away with the impression of a modest, soft-spoken guy in his twenties. Of course, I asked him how he became a turntable.fm hit.

"Dumb luck, probably," he explained. "One day I got a link from a friend; it was early on," he said.

"TT.fm," as it is often called, allows you access if you have a friend on Facebook who uses the service. The FAQ page says that turntable will wean itself from this means of engagement "eventually."

In any event, once in the system, you've got a choice—you can either search for and join a music room or you can create one of your own. You can become a fan of other users and "bop" them by clicking the "awesome" button while their selections are playing. This increases their point score, gradually allowing them access to a wider range of avatars.

There's a catch to launching new rooms, however. You can't listen to the selections you queue up for more than a few seconds unless there's more than one DJ occupying the "deck"—the array of five turntables at the top of the room. That's makes room creation difficult. I spent my first two weeks on turntable.fm unsuccessfully trying to initiate rooms.

But Ethan came up with a brilliant user and room name that mastered this challenge and helped make him a star.

"I wanted to be DJ Wooooo," he confessed, because "whenever you ever hear a song you go 'wooooo!' So that's what I typed."

The 'wooooo' move worked. DJ Wooooo's House/Dance Electro room is always packed with the maximum number of users: 200. I'm as likely as not to be "escorted to another room," as the dialogue window says, when I try to visit. But that's no problem, because there are an amazing number of rooms to pick, and some of them are morphing into true community music radio stations, often structured by musicians and developers.

Mashups

Take the mashup.fm room, for example. It specializes in the sharing of creative mixes of pop tunes. Mashup.fm was started by DJ EEP (aka Andrew Peron). He was joined by DJ GUTZ (Nicolas Gutierrez) and Aaron Ho, Director of Software Development at Stormfront Productions. They built the room up to what it is now.

I asked Ho about rules. "There really aren't any rules in the room besides to play mashup music and follow the line if there is one," he explained, referring to the queue to DJ on the deck. "Pretty much the community comes up with the rules."

But Ho's subsequent description indicates a well thought out strategy for keeping everyone happy.

If [users] want someone off deck for any reason, or if they want someone booted, then usually we will follow suit. We do enforce who is on deck at times whenever we have a homegrown DJ releasing music or some other event the room might be running. But essentially, the only 'rules' in place are those of necessity, the things that must be in place to keep the room operating, such as no spam tolerance, music that doesn't fit the genre, etc. Myself, DJ EEP, and GUTZ, along with a few volunteers from the room, monitor the situation and resolve any issues or arguments that crop up in the room. Our goal is not to control the room, but simply to ensure that Mashup.fm remains a reliable and fun place for people to come and enjoy new music.

Ho has written a Web application to organize all the mashup.fm fans who want to DJ; the app allows users to line up for a spot on the deck. Ho's So Simpullly MashUp site has also just released a new beta extension for turntable, written by Michael Frick. But as his answer indicates, turntable.fm rooms pose various challenges to their creators and moderators. The most obvious are deciding who will run the deck, and how to deal with trolls—rude types who come in to insult other users, or who play music that hasn't got much to do with the mission of the room.

Every room has two people who can deal with miscreants by booting them: the creator and the current moderator of the turntables. Moderators can also "skip" songs. More subtle disapproval comes when community members press the "lame" key on a selection. If a DJ gets too many lames, a boot is not far away.

Boots and superusers

The troll problem occasionally presents itself on my favorite turntable.fm room—Classical of Any Kind. Any Kind was launched by Peter Ryan, who will soon begin the second year of his Masters in Piano Performance at the University of Colorado. Ryan told me that when he first showed up at turntable.fm, the classical music focus was pretty scattered.

"Every day the classical community on TT.fm found its way to a completely different classical room, and usually one that was not created by any of the regulars," he explained. "As a result, we often had idle moderators and very little in the way of control over abusive users. Also, some in the community reacted very negatively to different eras of classical music, and I thought that unfair."

Thus was born Any Kind. The room is managed by a small circle of dedicated classical music lovers with fantastic taste. They include Flutist15 (a freshman flute performance major and Russian music fan), JohnTavener (a doctoral composition student with a passion for modern sounds), Nepomuk (early music and Baroque lover), and BubbleBobble ("our resident sunny-disposition member," as Ryan describes him, "who also always has great piano music to offer").

Any Kind is the best classical music station I've listened to in years. But sometimes users come in and play a movie soundtrack or pop track, angrily insisting that it is a "classic" and thus worthy of the room. Ryan tries to be lenient, but Turntable is making it easier to handle such problems. "TT.fm's recent installation of a temporary ban system based on the number of times a user is booted is a great help," he notes, "and people can no longer just keep reentering immediately and continuing to cause issues."

Still, keeping the room in good working order can be laborious. "If I'm not there, the person who has been there the longest is the mod, and that usually falls to someone who has been idling in the room all day long. I find I have to come in every now and then and boot the idle mods in order to ensure that an active person can keep an eye on the room."

TT.fm has gone so far as to deploy "superusers" (DJ Wooooo is one; so is Aaron Ho) with special authority to resolve issues. How do you become one of these supers? "For some reason, they all seem to be users who haven't nagged us into giving them superuser status," the FAQ page explains.

So, given the work involved, why do people get so passionately invested in their rooms?