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.

Article Author: Jennifer Lane

Jennifer Lane writes for Blogcritics to fulfill her passions for books, movies, music and writing. She also has an extensive professional career in Internet radio and publishes a blog called Audio4cast on topics related to the business of digital audio. …

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