Turntable.fm Gets Cloned in China as Duomi DJ

The main Duomi DJ interface - exactly the same as Turntable.fm's. Click to enlarge.

Chinese music-streaming service Duomi has launched a clone of Turntable.fm, dubbed Duomi DJ. Currently in private beta mode, it’s a very social music service that incorporates sharable playlists, voting on songs that you rack up as a DJ, and chat-rooms.

But whereas Turntable.fm links to Facebook, Duomi DJ will hook up to Renren and Tencent/Sina Weibo (or both) – but all that doesn’t seem to have been implemented yet.

Although it’s good to see a fun service getting a localization that ties-in with Chinese social media, it’s a pity that Duomi just basically ripped off the entire Turntable.fm interface and design, without bothering to think up how to make it look distinctive. We saw a similar laziness recently with a Path clone called PengYou – although Path’s CEO, Dave Morin, was a good sport to say it was “hilarious and flattering” in the article’s comments. We’re not sure if the Turntable.fm crew will feel the same way.

Anyway, Duomi DJ shows that the Chinese music industry is now ready for lots of licensed and legit music services. The market leader in China is hobbies-oriented social network, Douban. But there’s also big-hitting competition from Baidu’s (NASDAQ:BIDU) new Ting music-streaming service – although that’s not so fully social. Last month we heard rumors that the American social music service Pandora (NYSE:P) might be looking to launch in China.

Here’s the Duomi DJ frontpage, but it’s not much use without an invite.

[News source: DoNews – article in Chinese; Screenshot from Sina Weibo user, @xigualing]