Grooveshark is a new exciting P2P legal music streaming engine from which one can listen to, share and buy most of the popular music available on earth. Grooveshark also allows artists and record labels to promote themselves through the application with both advertisement and paying for listens from Grooveshark users. All data and analytics relating to an artist (or group of artists) are freely available to promoters, such as the number of times their content has been listened to, along with demographic and geographic information about the listeners.

Ever since I have been using Grooveshark’s web streaming engine, I have become a fan of it. It is light, it has a beautiful interface and I am hooked to it. Grooveshark outstands on the three points:

• Happiness – Find any song in the world and listen to it instantly.
• Discovery – Get introduced to new music and new friends.
• Freedom – Add your tunes to Grooveshark and access them from anywhere.

A look at the unique business model of Grooveshark rings a lot of bells in my mind. Grooveshark has a bit of everything and makes a great blend.

• It recommends you music! Last.fm does that, but Grooveshark does it better. They profile users and recommend you not just the music but also other users similar to you!
• Grooveshark is a P2P application based on internet. User can upload music for everyone to listen on streaming via Grooveshark Lite!
• Grooveshark lets you pay and download music. iTunes does that, I feel iTunes does it in a better way.
• Grooveshark Lite – I am loving it! It is the differentiating factor for me between Grooveshark and all the other similar services. It provides streaming of brilliant quality music; lets you upload new music, and lets you buy music. It is a wrap of all the features above mention. Fantastic!

Let me summarize my strategy if I Grooveshark was my brainchild, I would:

1. Not SELL it in the next 5 years or so! Grooveshark seems to have a lot of potential and market according to me. The way broadband connections are spouting all over the world, the users on Grooveshark would increase dramatically.
2. Expand to the emerging markets! Let’s face it, the billions of China and India cannot be ignored. Grooveshark can provide quality regional music fast than most of the mediums. I would target them!
3. Make Grooveshark Viral! Grooveshark can be brand in itself, just as YouTube is now. Although YouTube seems to be lacking a significant cash inflow, Grooveshark has it and should keep it a part of the model.
4. Kill the Radio! Imagine a world, few decades from now, where you have a (hypothetical) Grooveshark device (iPod like) and you can stream music wirelessly, the one which you like. You don’t have to bother picking songs, as Grooveshark recommends music of your taste. Simply awesome, won’t it be?

A couple of other web-services operate in this space, Tinysong, Amie Street, Last.fm, etc but I have not discussed them in this blog!

Though this blog has mostly been praises for Grooveshark (a bit of fiction too), it will have to work simultaneously on many fronts and against some big media players. But I see them placed in a very exciting position from where they can make it bigger and better! I suggest you to use Grooveshark and find what you like and more importantly dislike about it. Till then, enjoy the music.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Related posts:

1. Facebook Lite!
2. Hulu – winning the online video battle
3. Innovation and Twitter’s growing eco-system
4. How Google has always managed to be on top
5. Google v/s Microsoft: The Showdown Continues…….