"Hurts me still to see it go," one user types while a dozen or so others look on. "Whenever I think about it it hurts all over again like someone just told me."
The other users are quick to chime in: "The slow death is treacherous," one says. "I almost wish they had given us less notice," another types, before adding, "almost."
It's late Sunday night. Avatars of all shapes and colors are chatting and swaying in a virtual listening room while The Aquabats' cheeky punk rock song "Pizza Day" plays in the background. "I just sit around all sweaty and lethargic / And I'm just thinking 'bout where it all went wrong."
For the small group of people in this room, it all went wrong a week and a half earlier when Turntable announced plans to shut down its flagship streaming music service, Turntable.fm, after two and a half years. Many of the initial reactions online could best be described as surprise — not surprise that the service was shutting down, but that it still existed. 
See also: Turntable.fm Doubles Down on Group Listening Model With Major Update
Turntable.fm was the hot startup of mid-2011, attracting more than 360,000 users in its first three months and raising $7 million from big name VC firms and celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Jimmy Fallon. The media wondered whether it would be "the next big thing" in online music, while some analysts suggesting that it posted a significant threat to major players in the space like Pandora.
However, Turntable struggled to grow or even maintain its user base in the months and years that followed. By the time it announced in a blog post that Turntable.fm was shutting down, many had already written it off as little more than a summer fad. But not everyone.
Even a struggling Internet service has its loyal supporters who feel heartbroken when it goes dark. Turntable's fans have since expressed their grief in tweets, blog posts, online petitions like the one below and, of course, in the Turntable.fm listening rooms. On this night, with just under 24 hours until the music stops for good on Turntable.fm, users are paying their respects in DJ rooms with names like "One Last Sunday" and "Motel 5 - We'll leave the lights on."
In the latter room, Whitney Houston's song "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)" is playing. The title seems to sum up just what drew people to Turntable.fm in the first place and what many now feel sad to lose. "I had to come say thanks ... for everything and to everyone here that has graced me with their friendship and music," writes a user who goes by the name Deb Luvs YouTunes~TT. "I Never expected to get so much from [Turntable]."
The next morning, Turntable's office in New York's SoHo neighborhood was somber but busy. Killing off a service isn't as simple as flipping a switch. The team had to map out shutdown procedures, do some final coding, deal with the stream of feedback from users and fire off lots of emails. On top of that, the startup continues to work on Turntable Live, a virtual events platform, which will become its sole focus when Turntable.fm is officially shuttered.
"It's been a roller coaster of a ride and it's definitely a sad day for us," Billy Chasen, cofounder and CEO of Turntable, told Mashable on Monday. "We all really love the product."
For the past few months, Chasen knew that he had to consider closing down the site, but he repeatedly put off the inevitable. "I've been personally trying to prolong it for as long as possible," Chasen said. "I was hoping that we would find out a way to keep it up, but that never happened."
Turntable's problems boiled down to two things: expenses and user retention. Music royalties and hosting costs made it impossible for Turntable.fm to break even, let alone turn a profit, and most users didn't stick around for long.
"Turntable has always had a problem with retaining users," Chasen admitted. "It's something that people fall in love with for a short period of time, a couple of weeks to a month, and then they kind of burn out on it." Only a small percentage of the users — "tens of thousands," he says — used the service every day. "It's a problem that we've had since the beginning and no matter what we've added and improved on the product, we haven't been able to stem that."
Rather than go down as the founder of the next big music startup, Chasen may go down as the king of pivots. Early in his career, he launched an app called Firefly that let users see the cursors of others on the same webpage and engage with those users. The app received some press coverage, but didn't take off so Chasen pivoted (successfully) by creating a web analytics company called Chartbeat, which many publications rely on today. He followed that up with another startup called Stickybits, which let users scan barcodes of physical objects and attach digital messages to them. This effort also attracted significant funding and media coverage, but it proved to be more of a novelty at the time. So he pivoted yet again to Turntable.
Each time Chasen has pivoted, he told me in an earlier interview, he tries to leave his emotions out of it. "I try not to make decisions based on the amount of work I've put into something or the amount of love I've put into something," he said, "and instead pull myself back and look at the usage and make the best decision going forward on how to evolve."
But that's harder to do this time: Turntable.fm wasn't just a business for Chasen and his team, it was also a way of life. They made friends from the service and even hired employees through it. One developer at Turntable.fm who was hired directly from the Turntable community met his wife through Turntable as well.
"There's no graceful way to have everybody leave," he said.

The party starts to pick up in the late afternoon. Multiple publications, including Mashable, organized sendoff listening rooms for the final day. The Turntable team created its own room, called Turntable's Last Day Party, where users fight to get in one last song.
The songs range from obvious farewell picks Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" to the cliche with Semisonic's "Closing Time" (which elicits more than a few jeers) to the just plain silly like a track from a band called Hall and Goats. Every few minutes, some user enters the room wondering whether the shutdown is a publicity stunt or suggesting that the startup is just craven for money. One Turntable employee who goes by the user name Buckmaster Buck speaks out: "tt.fm was free for two years. So, yeah, we’re all about the money," he writes. "If you loved tt.fm, have faith in the team."
As it turns out, the team is hearing just what the crowd is hearing. Throughout the day, tracks from this listening room are being played on the speakers in the Turntable office. "Music has been playing constantly in all of these rooms, in almost a million rooms, over the last 2.5 years and it's all going to go silent after tonight," Chasen says, while the music plays somewhere in the background. "It's definitely emotional for all of us."
By 5 p.m. E.T. there are 75 people listening in the room. That number tops 120 by 7 p.m. and nears the 200-person limit after 9 p.m., the final hour. Users count down the minutes and flood the chat board with song requests, gripes about the queueing system, spam, gibberish, praise for good song picks, scorn for bad ones. When the last song is finally picked, the audience can hardly hold back its excitement: It is "The Final Countdown" by Europe. For a minute, the chat fills up with people shouting, "Yes!" Then, recognizing that this is in fact the last song, the mood turns somber again. Five minutes later, the track ends and a simple "Thank You" message pops up on the screen.
Turntable.fm was dead. In total, there were 4,000 listeners on the site to catch a glimpse of its final moments: not a huge number of users by the standards of most major websites, but not entirely insignificant either for a service that had long before been written off as dead.
Before it had gone black, however, many of these users had already started making plans to try out other similar services like Plug.dj and Spotify app Soundrop. Some in the chat were even promoting an after party on Plug. It's time to move on.
The next day, Turntable's team will move on also, shifting their focus to Turntable Live. But six minutes after Turntable.fm goes black, Chasen sends an email: "Sad day."
Images: Turntable