plug.dj will hijack your life

This week’s big social music networking ‘thing’ du jour is plug.dj.  It’s the same premise as Turntable.fm – graphical chat room with a ‘DJ’ playing music for the room.  Two things immediately make it better though:

1. the songs are streamed from Youtube and Soundcloud, so there’s no Turntable-esque licensing fiasco;

2. DANCING CARTOONS.

Being about as twee as fuck, I can be convinced to sign up to just about anything if it involves cute vaguely manga-style cartoons.  Note: this does not extend to trying anything you might find in Cosmo’s sex pages with pastel-purple cutie-pie dragons. Even I’m not that wrong in the head.  Although someone who signs up to the site is blatantly going to be and will end up reverse-engineering it to show rooms filled with mass orgies soundtracked by David Guetta. Sick bastards.

This is what it looks like:

How it works: you choose an avatar, choose a room, and start listening.  Your avatar (I think) is the one that appears directly in front of the desk, meaning if the room has the cursed Perfect Semi-Circle audience thing going, you are going to look like that twat giving it large down the front.  Sorry.  Then again in this universe you do look like a hipster koala bear so that’s pretty much what you are anyway.

If you like something, ‘woot’ it; the cartoon starts dancing and you earn a point (which ultimately goes towards more avatar choices).  If you don’t, ‘meh’ it; if it receives enough, it gets skipped.  If that’s not good enough for you, you also can ask to DJ an existing room, or create your own, if you fancy indulging your megalomaniacal side.

Simple, yes?  Well…

Being a regular Popjustice reader, and it being a popular room, I spent much of my day hanging out in their room. Mostly listening.  At one point Grace Dent talked about threesomes, and Jedward’s sex lives, and I proffered that I’m not comfortable with viewing Jedward, or their individual components, as anything other than Ken dolls. If that.  I mean they basically are anyway.  I hope.

And then some of the plug.dj regulars got wind of the room’s popularity. And they slunk in. Without knowing the theme of the room, or its origins.  What resulted is what I can only describe as THE DARK SIDE OF MUSIC SOCIAL NETWORKING.  Namely, loads of proper electro/house/dubstep-heads trying to take over the room and tell the PJ fans what the room should be.  The whole thing sort of descended into the Hunger Games of music, except with less Jennifer Lawrence and more quasi-Skrillex.  Yes, in this context Skrillex was those mental bee things.  Quasi-Skrillex is a fate worse than death.

Although the bit where someone went on a self-appointed totalitarian removal of everyone from the DJ booth for having the gall to play that bloody Goyte song was a bit brilliant.

It’s pretty much a nightclub with your mates and the dicks you usually meet, all in one space. And with cartoons.  It is therefore ZOMGworthy, amazeballs, etc.  Do investigate imminently, yes?

Oh, yeah, and do pop along to my room/fan me if you like by clicking here… x