Grooveshark founder Sam Tarantino was driving by a used record store one day and decided to try to create a virtual version of a music store where people could upload their music and others could pay to download it, with a portion of that sale going to the person who put it there. A nice, albeit complex thought that has morphed recently into a music site where you can stream any song you want to hear.

Online music sites can be divided into two basic groups – there are sites that let you listen to songs on demand, build playlists, and control exactly what you hear; and there are sites that are online radio stations that offer you a stream of music that is influenced by listener choice, but not completely controlled by the listener. Grooveshark is one of a new breed of streaming music sites that offers the listener choice and control. When you visit the site and type in an artist, you get a list of songs that you can choose to hear, put in a listening queue, or embed in a web page.

Grooveshark is streaming 50 to 60 million songs per month to more than 400,000 users. Their audience is growing at a rate of 2 to 3% per day.

Recently, Grooveshark has launched a new service called Grooveshark Artists which is 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.

Grooveshark Artists has integrated a partnership with Creative Commons into the site so that artists can choose the permissions they want and appropriately license their music. Other partnerships are designed to help the independent artist as well – such as ticket sales with Showclix, fund raising partner Sellaband, lyric posting services from lyrics.com, and interactive store options for music downloads and more from Bandcamp.

Jack DeYoung, VP of Label Relations for Grooveshark, says they want to make Grooveshark Artists work for musicians. “Making sure the artists get paid has been a priority for us from day one.  We have a master’s agreement that they can sign when they sign up that ensures they’re being adequately paid for their songs being played on Grooveshark.  We also have a litany of partnerships with companies that give bands the opportunity to help fund and sell their music”.

It’s working according to Khamelien, a hip-hop/reggae artist who paid $500 per month for a three month campaign on Grooveshark Artists. He got 21,000 song plays and over 2500 fans from the campaign. According to his record label Goin’ Native Records; they saw a significant increase in iTunes sales as a result.

When they sign up, musicians can pick the amount they want to spend, choose to have a banner appear when their song plays, pick certain artists that they want their songs to play after, and more. It’s a great way to find listeners who are likely to like your music, and make a connection. Grooveshark Artists is all about connecting musicians with listeners and offering them tools to help them market themselves. It’s an idea that enables artists to circumvent the stifling music industry. Given all the bad press about the record labels these days, it seems like an idea whose time has come.

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I met some of the guys from Grooveshark earlier this year (whatup Vishal and John!) when I was down in Florida for the Front End Design Conference. We had had a good time. We hung out and talked shop at the conference, ate alligator tacos, and saw Black Moth Super Rainbow.

Never heard of Grooveshark? Well you should, it’s amazing. You can listen to any song in the world for free from your computer. With a free account, you can make playlists, favorite songs, upload your own songs, and be friends with other Grooveshark users. It’s like iTunes, except your library is about 1,000 times bigger and it’s free. Annnnd, it has radio mode which learns your likes and dislikes so it’s got the Pandora angle covered.

Now Grooveshark is going to have an iPhone app! It’s pretty full featured, meaning that all of your favorites and playlists from you account come with you to the app. As well as of course the ability to search all the songs in the world and listen to them.

NOTE: The Grooveshark app is not yet approved by Apple. Hopefully, it will be soon.

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Popular music streaming service Grooveshark is taking their large database of music on the road and bringing it to you in all shapes and sizes, for whatever social purpose you might have.

The service, which was previously great as a destination site, has just unveiled three fantastic products that will ensure you see a lot more Grooveshark (Grooveshark) across the social web in your music future. The Facebook application alone is newsworthy enough, but combine that with a harmonious WordPress (WordPress) plugin and a Tinysong API, and Grooveshark’s got a major hit.

Grooveshark’s new Facebook application (ResuWe Facebook Application) is about to make music waves throughout the social site. After installing the application, you can then search the Grooveshark database of songs — 10 million strong — to select a song to share with friends or publish to your profile.

Published songs will then appear on your wall where your friends can listen to them. Given the size of Facebook and the viral potential of the app, this is going to be as catchy as those pop songs we can’t get out of our heads.
Add playlists to your WordPress blog

Just as cool is the new Grooveshark for WordPress plugin, which essentially takes the hassle out of adding music to your blog posts. You can install it manually via download, or search for “grooveshark” from your WordPress administrative panel.

Once installed you can configure your Grooveshark account and adjust the plugin options. For each blog post you write, you’ll now have the option to search songs, as well as view favorites and playlists, and play tracks right from the post admin page.

Adding music is as simple as clicking the plus sign, while clicking the “Appearance” button allows for fast customization of the playlist player.

The end result is a nifty looking widget or link (widget pictured) at the top or bottom of your post with the specified playlist. Also, depending on your WordPress Grooveshark settings, the playlists you create in WordPress will be saved to your Grooveshark profile. That’s just groovy. As a whole, Grooveshark’s WordPress application is simply fantastic and music to our ears.
Share Grooveshark songs anywhere

If that’s not enough grooviness, the music streaming site is also introducing a Tinysong API. Tinysong is just a URL shortening service for Grooveshark music. In fact, it’s number one on our list of ways to share music with Twitter.

Now developers can use the API to support various Tinysong functionalities on their own sites. Ping.fm (Ping.Fm) is already using the Tinysong API to make it a painless process to quickly post shared tracks out to your pinged sites.

We think each of the three new Grooveshark products capture the simplicity and quality of the service, while supporting the social sharing features we want right now. We’re big fans, but we’d love to hear your thoughts on the new additions in the comments.

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Damn you, Grooveshark! I’ve been doing just fine without any Adobe Air applications installed on my system. But you come along and release a standalone interface, and now I’m hooked.

As Sebastien reported with Waver, the Grooveshark Air app seems to be a bit more smooth and responsive than the browser-based version. Whatever the reason, as a guy that runs on unstable, developer-channel browsers that have a penchant for crashing, it’s nice to have my streaming audio running stably in its own app.

The app’s system tray icon provides pause, skip, and previous controls, and notifications with album art and track info can also be set to appear in whichever corner you prefer.

Grooveshark Desktop is currently for VIPs only. If you have a $3/month paid account, just sign in and head to your account page (or click here) to download Desktop. Adobe Air is required, but as long as you have the Flash Player plugin the install just takes a couple of clicks and some patience.

So now I’ve got a great out-of-browser way to access Grooveshark on my desktop. I wonder when I’ll be able to do this on my iPod Touch? Soon, I hope.

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There’s a reason Grooveshark is so popular: It’s one of the most expansive, customizable, and feature-rich streaming music services on the Web, and it’s completely free to use. You can upload your own music collection and stream it from anywhere you go. You can also search for practically any song or artist you can think of, find it, and stream it instantly over the Web. Grooveshark also allows you to save playlists, bookmark and favorite songs, network with other users, share your favorites on Facebook, Twitter, and even embed widgets on your blog.

Today, Grooveshark unveiled a new version of their Web service, which retains its familiar, easy-to-use look and feel but adds a ton of new features. The last time we reviewed Grooveshark we found it a great service, but the new version comes with customizable themes to fit your mood, faster song searching and streaming, smarter playlists, more sharing options, and a more jukebox-like feel that will make users coming from desktop apps much more comfortable with the layout.

Grooveshark’s VIP users — who pay a subscription fee of $3/month or $30/year to have access to the site without ads, to preview and beta test new features, and to get priority support and service if they need it — have already been using the new version. The service depends on the VIP users to report issues, suggest feature improvements, and test drive their new tweaks. Now, after weeks of testing, the developers at Grooveshark are ready to make their improvements available to all users.

New Grooveshark - SidebarThe new version of Grooveshark comes with improvements both under the hood and to the interface and design of the service. Users will first notice that the layout has changed to look more like a traditional music player. You have quick access to your playlists, music library, Grooveshark friends, and favorite tracks right from the left sidebar.

The sidebar gives you quicker access to your most commonly used features and playlists. Even smart playlists, popular songs, and songs currently queued are available from the sidebar. In the previous design, you had to click at least two or three times on the icons under the search bar to get to the same information, and if you needed to go back you had to use breadcrumbs at the top of the page.

New Grooveshark - ThemesAdditionally, the new Grooveshark comes with a dozen themes you can use to customize the layout and display of your window. You can use the default display if you want to keep it clean, or switch to one of the user-designed themes to spice up your listening experience. The layout of the Grooveshark window has changed as well. It adapts itself to the size of your browser window, preventing you from having to scroll side to side on small displays or wasting a ton of screen real estate on large ones.

New Grooveshark - QueueThe developers behind Grooveshark put a lot of work into making the new version feel more like a music player. Rather than cram the queued songs and the playback controls into the same area at the bottom of the window, they slimmed down the playback controls so you can easily play, pause, or skip between queued songs. They also turned the entire bottom of the Grooveshark player into the queued songs window. If you just want to see the name of the next song or the songs you’ve already played, you can minimize the list that spans the bottom of the screen. Alternatively, if you like seeing the album art for the songs in your playlist, you can enlarge it.

Sharing and management features have also been simplified. To add a song to your playlist, just click the plus-sign next to the song title, and if you want to share the song on Facebook, StumbleUpon, or Twitter, click the envelope next to the song title. There are additional buttons next to the song title that make it easy to add a song to your library, favorite the song, or even download it or its ringtone to your computer. If the song is already playing, hover the mouse anywhere over the progress bar to see all of those options in a pop-up dialog, which also includes buttons to create a widget of the song, flags it as poor quality, and links to the artist’s library.

NewGrooveshark - PlayerGrooveshark also allows you to skip back or forward through individual songs — a long-overdue feature that the previous version lacked. Additionally, the Grooveshark Radio feature is more prominent in the new version: simply click the “Radio” button to turn it on or off. This is much clearer than the spinning gear indicator in the previous version.

Under the hood, Grooveshark developers have added song pre-loading, so tracks that are added to your queue start buffering even when the songs before them are still playing. This means you won’t have to wait for songs to buffer quite so often, and you won’t have to deal with a song starting to play and then cutting out because it hasn’t had time to download the stream. Additionally, the entire feel of the service is smoother, sharper, and gets you to your music faster.

Grooveshark was already a winning service in my book, but the new design and layout are substantial improvements that make it much easier to use and more accessible to first-time users, or users who already use desktop apps or other streaming music services. Add to this the fact that Grooveshark has one of the deepest and richest catalogs of high-quality streaming music from artists of all genres and multiple major labels, and you have a pretty strong combination of form and function.

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I’ve always considered the Grooveshark web app’s UI to be quite amazing, so I was wary when I was granted preview access to the service’s new look, which the startup is presenting publicly for the first time today (at 12 AM EST). Fortunately, they somehow managed to make it even more awesome than it already was, and the makeover was more than a new lick of paint as it also included a number of performance tweaks to make it run smoother.

In case you’re not familiar with Grooveshark: it’s a great web-based music search, play and management tool that’s been around since April last year. You can use the app to instantly look for, share and listen to music, and there’s the quintessential social component that allows you to interact with people from its community and discover new music from others’ choices.

With the new look, Grooveshark’s design is now more desktop client-like (think Spotify, Deezer or Imeem), which in my opinion is a good thing. The overall design and the new navigation bar on the side make for a much smoother user experience, and you can switch themes to make the app fit your mood or resize the menus to fit your screen.

But the back-end tweaks that have increased the speed of the application are what’s making me seriously considering switching to Grooveshark for most of my online music needs. Playback between tunes is now seamless, with no more lag in between tracks when you’ve added multiple ones to a playlist. Switching between menu items and tabs is as fast as I consider possible inside a browser. In short: great new design combined with an excellent user experience.

Grooveshark is still struggling to get all major music industry players involved for the ‘legalization’ of its vast content library, which is in large part put together by avid users uploading music files straight from their hard drives. So far, the only one it has signed up is EMI and that was after the company sued Grooveshark over copyright infringement.

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I love my Grooveshark pro subscription - I paid for it a while back when the new VIP preview went live and I’ve never regretted it. With more new features rolling out and a major announcement today, the service keeps getting better and better.

Today’s big news: EMI Music and EMI Music Publishing have come on board to “create a mutually sustainable deal which represents the future of digital music,” said Grooveshark CEO Sam Tarantino.

In layman’s terms: Grooveshark listeners now have access to EMI’s massive catalog of tunes. In a brief phone chat with Grooveshark’s Joshua Bonnanain, I got the distinct impression that this was just the start. While he didn’t spell out any specifics for me (we love a good mystery anyway) I’m hoping that the ability to buy and download playlists is coming soon. I’d much rather use Grooveshark for my purchases than iTunes - Josh said stay tuned, wheels are turning.

Some added coolness for current VIPs: there are now half a dozen new themes available to use and added options for the now playing bar. You can choose either no cover art, or artwork in two different sizes. It’s an awesome option, especially if you use Grooveshark on both small and large displays.

Reaching a deal with EMI is fantastic news - here’s hoping other labels follow suit.

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EMI has dropped its copyright infringement lawsuit against the music streaming service Grooveshark, opting instead to license its sound recording and publishing catalogs to Grooveshark in the United States under undisclosed terms.

“We now have a licensing deal with [EMI],” Grooveshark vice president of communications Isaac Moredock told Wired.com, and both companies confirmed to us that the lawsuit has been dropped. EMI’s sound recording and publishing catalogs represent “about 26 percent of the music that’s out there,” said Moredock, “so it’s a step in the right direction.”

EMI, which confirmed the deal to Wired.com, seems satisfied. “We think services like Grooveshark offer great music discovery options for fans,” said EMI Music’s global head of digital business development Mark Piibe in a statement.  “In turn, Grooveshark offers a new revenue stream for our artists and will help us learn more about how we can better connect different types of fans with artists.”

Like Spotify in Europe, Escape Media’s Grooveshark is a freemium music service, meaning that you can hear any song in the catalog on-demand and save any of them into playists without paying a cent. The service generates revenue from visual ads embedded in the free version of the service and $3 monthly payments from premium users who pay to remove ads from the service.

When asked whether Grooveshark’s deal involves handing over equity to EMI, Moredock said, “We can’t go public with [details about the deal] yet, just because we’re going to try to use this as a template to go and sign all the other major labels, and we’re hoping that they agree to similar terms. But until we have other major labels onboard, we can’t really get into the specifics of the terms - one, for overall safety, and two, because we’re trying to keep it ahead of Spotify.”
Grooveshark hopes to beat Spotify, pictured here, in the race to launch a free, comprehensive on-demand streaming app in the states.

Grooveshark hopes to beat Spotify, pictured here, in the race to launch a free, comprehensive on-demand streaming app in the states.

In order to beat Spotify in the race to launch an on-demand streaming app in the US, Grooveshark still must sign Sony, Warner, and Universal, not to mention independent aggregators like Merlin and The Orchard. MoreDock told Wired.com that Grooveshark hopes to sign deals with the remaining majors in the next six months.

“We are dead set on signing those agreements with the [remaining] labels to start getting copyright holders and creators of that music paid, because at the end of the day, that’s kind of what it’s all about — making sure the propagators of this art form are actually getting paid,” said Moredock. “We want to effect a legitimate change in the musical landscape, because bands aren’t making that much money anymore, and we want to change that.”

(Another competitor, imeem, has had an ad-supported music streaming service in the US for years, but it encourages users to visit a separate web page for each song rather than presenting its entire catalog in a single iTunes-like interface, the way Spotify and Grooveshark do.)

Grooveshark is also readying an iPhone app that, like Spotify’s, will include an offline mode that caches music on the iPhone or iPod Touch for high-quality playback regardless of a mobile device’s internet connection.  According to Moredock, mobile access to the entire catalog will cost $5-$10 per month, which either way would be less than what Rhapsody or Spotify charges for mobile on-demand music. And unlike those services, Grooveshark hopes to experiment with a free, limited-functionality mobile app as well.

Spotify, already a big hit overseas of course, recently pushed its U.S. launch back to as late as early 2010, while Grooveshark’s surprise deal with EMI gives it a lead in the U.S. And when it comes to independent bands and labels, Grooveshark has a more inclusive approach than Spotify, which requires bands to sign to a label or aggregator in order to be included in the service. Instead, Grooveshark permits anyone to upload their own music and receive half of the revenue generated by their music, regardless of whether they have a distribution deal.

But there’s no question that Spotify has a big advantage of its own - a massive war chest it can use to sign label and publisher deals, a peer-to-peer architecture that saves on bandwidth costs, a critically-praised downloadable app feels more like iTunes than Grooveshark’s web-based service does and can save files locally in the premium version, and an iPhone app that’s already winning over fans in Europe.

Then there’s the question of copyright infringement, which led to EMI suing Grooveshark in the first place. The Grooveshark service currently boasts six million songs, all of which were uploaded by the million-strong community (the EMI deal doesn’t involve the label sending over its catalog, for instance). As such, plenty of unlicensed music appears on the site, such as the Beatles’ “I Dig a Pony,” embedded to the right. To deal with unlicensed music, Grooveshark relies on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s takedown provision, which requires it to remove content upon being notified by a copyright holder.

Moredock says the recent Universal vs. Veoh ruling supports Grooveshark’s copyright policy, but a courtroom is not a negotiating table. Before it can sign the other three majors, Grooveshark could face pressure to implement audio fingerprinting technology to help keep unlicensed songs off of the service, the way YouTube did to fend of its lawsuits. In that sense, Spotify has another advantage: its “ask for permission first” approach to licensing likely sits better with the labels than Grooveshark’s crowdsourced, DMCA-reliant approach.

Regardless, Grooveshark has licensed EMI for U.S. streaming and Spotify has not. So the score as things stand now when it comes to launching a freemium on-demand music application in the U.S. is Grooveshark 1, Spotify 0.

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