What is it? And how did it come about?
Grooveshark is a company of about 40 young entrepreneurs. It is essentially a music service that rivals similar applications such as Last.fm and Pandora, the two major players in legal music discovery and ‘free’ music streaming. It is owned by Escape Media Group Inc. and runs out of Gainesville, Florida. It was founded in 2006 by Sam Tarantino. Began as peer to peer file sharing in 2006, and has since changed to a streaming model.
Features:
* Upload your own music collection and stream it from anywhere you go
* Search for pretty much any song or artist you can think of. Find the song and stream it instantly over the web
* This application allows you to save playlists, bookmark and “favourite” your songs.
* You can network with other users, share favourites over facebook, twitter etc.
* Grooveshark Lite: Unlike the full Grooveshark service, no application download is required to use Grooveshark Lite (Click here to view for YouTube clip)
Grooveshark Artists:
- Grooveshark Artists, offers pay-for-play audio real-estate matched to its existing track recommendations. It provides analytics tools for track placement optimization.” (Click Groovshark artists link above to discover more about this application).
- Designed to complement the streaming on demand site and give independent artists a chance to find an audience. For $500 an artist can purchase 500 song plays on Grooveshark. The songs will be played to listeners who have chosen to listen to other songs or artists similar to theirs. Listeners can rate the songs, and artists can see how the audience is responding to their music.
This tool can be useful for PR practitioners to stay on top of past, current and future trends. What is hot and what is not.
Will it survive?
Based on the unpleasant history of digital music start-ups to date, the chances of Grooveshark’s survival are very low. This does not mean it is doomed to fail; however, its staying power decreases each time they have copyright issues. They have been sued by major music labels, such as EMI and Universal Music. Whether this service is actually legal or not is still questionable. The issue with EMI has since been resolved- Click here to read Grooveshark’s statement regarding its troubles with copyright infringement or check out Danyel’s blog to read more.
On a final note, I thought this YouTube video of a teenager pitching why he loves Grooveshark, was extremely amusing. If you have time, click the YouTube link above to check it out.
No comments:
Post a Comment