Grooveshark

OK, not to keep tooting our own horn or anything, but we just launched TinySong to help with all your music-sharing needs. Type in the name of pretty much any song, and we’ll give you a short link that you can send to your friends. Once they click, they’re taken right to the song, where they can listen to their heart’s content.

It’s pretty much like tinyurl, but on the other end is a song for your (or your friends’) listening pleasure. My favorite use so far is for Twitter or instant messenger (below), but if you can think of any other cool uses for it, I’d love to hear them!

I’m listening to “Apple Blossom” by the White Stripes right now. Check it out!

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If you’ve ever laid awake at night fretting over a lack of information about what’s going on around Grooveshark, sleep well, young insomniac: we just launched the Grooveshark Community Blog. We’ll be posting information on Grooveshark updates, showcase some of the coolest goings-on between us and you awesome music fans, and tons of other goodies.

So if you ever find yourself wondering “What the dickens is going on with this Grooveshark stuff?”, welcome! And if there’s anything you’d like to see here, definitely let us know.

Thanks + <3

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If you came here because you heard that Grooveshark is making some cool updates tonight, well, it’s true–but don’t worry. Fundamental functionality should be unaffected, and once the updates are done, everyone on Grooveshark will be able to put their own library on Grooveshark Lite for easy access and shareability.

The only parts of Grooveshark that should be effected are the displaying of album art and Grooveshark profile pictures, between 10 PM and 6 AM. So if you’re using Grooveshark to lurk your friends, sorry! Other than that, Grooveshark will be back up in no time–with even more great songs than before.

As always, if you have any questions, problems, hate-mail or love letters, we’d love to hear it: let us know!

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As we mentioned earlier, we’ve been working round-the-clock to get Grooveshark Lite as useful and stable as possible since last week’s launch (and round of updates even before that). Right now, there are is still some song-streaming funkiness occurring sporadically which can be caused by a couple of different things.

One of the major problems we’ve become privy to relates to a recent known bug involving the current release of Firefox for Windows users. Although they don’t know what the exact cause is right now, Mozilla support offers a couple of suggestions for working around it:

1) You can uninstall both the ActiveX plug-in for Windows as well as the Flash plug-in for Firefox by following Adobe’s instructions here. Since there are two different Flash installers for Windows (Firefox and Internet Explorer, respectively), you might want to download the Flash uninstaller for Firefox, close Firefox and run the uninstaller, then download and run the latest installer just to be sure.

2) If that doesn’t work, some people have reported success uninstalling Flash, running CCleaner, rebooting, then re-installing Flash. This will take care of some users’ problems who’ve been missing wavemapper in their Windows registry.

3) Try closing all tabs, clearing your cache, restarting Firefox, then loading a song from Grooveshark Lite again. This is definitely not a long-term fix, but it works for a while–and it’s quick and easy.

Much of Grooveshark Lite is based on open source project Red5. As a media streaming server, it does everything we need to power the basic functionality of Grooveshark Lite–but it still needs a bit of work. We’ve been tirelessly poring through the code, working on optimization that should hopefully not only mitigate the aforementioned Windows+Firefox bug, but lessen the need for restarting servers–making everything reliable, rock-solid, and as stable as a noble gas.

All of us at Grooveshark can’t thank you guys enough for being patient with us. We’re a small bunch, and all of your interest is really amazing. And thanks to those of you who’ve sent us feedback; we’re always on the lookout to hear what you guys want, so thanks to those who’ve voiced their opinion–keep it up, everyone, and we’ll keep not sleeping to make Grooveshark Lite better!

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Qtrax claimed to be the first legal music download site to offer free streaming and free downloads. Qtrax plans to pay labels 50% of advertising revenues to cover the cost of the free music downloads and free streaming.

Qtrax, which is built on the Songbird platform, crawled through the Gnutella p2p network and removed viruses, installed DRM and gave users an easy way to download and listen to free music. They did all this with without the approval of the major labels.

Unfortunately, after their announcement yesterday that they had all four record labels signed and 25 million songs, it looks like this all might be hot air. It turns out that they had spoken to all four major labels, but they hadn’t actually signed any of them. Universal, EMI, Warner, and Sony BMG all announced they did not yet have a deal with Qtrax.

Typically, startups have gone the route of begging for forgiveness rather than asking permission, but it appears Qtrax has developed its own strategy:

Claim to have permission, and then beg for forgiveness.

Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

The reason the labels are having such a tough time with Qtrax is simply because of the possibility of a network such as Qtrax. They give users access to 25 million songs they can easily download, for free, wrapped in DRM. In return, the labels get 50% of the advertising revenue. Given the fact that Qtrax files do not work on an iPod, they probably won’t grow to a critical scale.

At this point, the labels have given away their entire catalog for essentially nothing, only to be protected by Qtrax’s DRM system. And we know it’s just a matter of time until some hacker develops a DRM-crack that allows users to access 25 million songs that play on iPods, for free, without spamware or viruses, with the same ease of using iTunes, and the labels still get that same 50% of revenue.

So do you see why a system like Qtrax is a bit dangerous and scary for the record labels?

Grooveshark has built their model around enabling labels to maintain their current business model of selling tracks on a per-song or per-album basis. While we realize that the price of songs will probably slide down a little before there is a solid-equilibrium, the cost per song model can still be attainable, especially given $.49 or $.29 download prices.

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No, we’re not talking about what your weird uncle Frank does at the family Christmas gathering every year. We’re talking about more FREE stuff.

We’ve decided to have the first annual Grooveshark iTouch Myself for Christmas Contest. And if you haven’t figured it out by the title, one of the prizes in an iPod Touch.

Here’s a rundown of what you could win:

1st place - 8gb iPod Touch + $200 in GS music

2nd place - 4gb iPod Nano + $150 in GS music

3rd place - 1gb iPod Shuffle + $100 in GS music

20 Runners-up - T-shirt + $5 gift card

The winners will be announced on Dec. 21, and will be notified via email. We’ll overnight the top three prizes so they get there by Christmas. The 20 runner up prizes will come snail mail.
Now, like we said, this is a contest, so here’s the skinny on how to win:

Contest begins Dec. 1 @ 12:01 am.
Contest ends Dec. 20 @ midnight.

(more…)

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Did I say cheap? I meant Free.

Our buddy Chaz over at paidgameplayer.com took time out of his freezing schedule up in Denver to call us and tell us about a great promotion Electronic Gaming Monthly is having.

They’re giving away free 12-month subscriptions to their magazine — that’s it. No strings attached. No credit card needed.

Just follow the link and fill out the name and address fields and you’ll get 12 months of EGM for free.

Here’s the link: Free EGM

(more…)

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In our continuing effort to keep you abreast of all of Grooveshark’s features, we present you with a quick howto on using Grooveshark’s Invite system (or at least show you where it is).

The first step is to ensure you have registered for Grooveshark. It’s free, and if downloading music isn’t your cup of tea, you can still use Grooveshark’s personal radio for full-streaming.

Now that you have your account setup, let’s get going.

On your homepage you’ll see the latest songs from the community on the billboard, the top users, and the top playlists.

AND, if you scroll down to about 3/4 of the page, you’ll see the “INVITATIONS” section on the right hand column.

Currently we don’t have the ability to import your contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, etc. but we figure you don’t want to blast your entire email list anyway.

Grab your friends’ email addresses, and stick them into the invite manager one at a time, be sure to keep the “add this person..” box checked so that your friends will become your ..friends on Grooveshark as well.

Sometimes your friends might not open their emails immediately; I have a number of friends who do this, so make sure to keep bugging them until they finally signup. I’ve found that getting my friends to sign up for Grooveshark is the hard part, but once they’re on the site and start using it, they’re always giving me the “why didn’t you tell me about this sooner, blah, blah.”

Now, I’m not supposed to tell you this, but the Grooveshark algorithm may take into account the amount of friends you have on the system, and the amount of friends you refer to the community in determining how often you receive recompensation ($.25 credits), so it’s in your best interest to get your buds on the site as well.

Remember, to enjoy our free full length streaming and personal radio, you must register or check our InviteShare if you just can’t wait !

Be sure to check some other posts you may enjoy :)

How To Dress Like A Rock Star

How To Make Money On Grooveshark

How To Start a Band

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