What with me moving house in the next few weeks and a bunch of other important stuff happening, I thought I might as well bring this archived blog back into play, so at least my “academic” posts and my more well-read Audiogalaxy & Grooveshark reviews can still be found.

My hope is that the old blog will be restored as soon as I get chance to look at it but for now, I’m thankful to have at least some old stuff stored away on this site.

In the meantime, if you’ve ever lost all of your WordPress.org content (just posts & pages, my plugins & theme are intact) at complete random, and found a way to retrieve stuff, please let me know.

Apple very quickly clamped down on Grooveshark’s iPhone app, removing it from the App store, citing violations of the ToS, although it’s argued that it’s more to do with Apple’s digital music interests and iTunes. Apparently it is possible for jailbroken iPhones to install a version of the app. In the past week, however, Mashable reported that Google has also removed Grooveshark from the Android market, much to Grooveshark’s apparent surprise, for pretty much the same reasons; ToS violations and the rumoured development of Google’s own cloud music service. As of right now, the Grooveshark app is still fully functional on my phone; there was talk of the app being remotely removed from phones, but I’m not sure how that would work. Besides which, it’s very easy to install apps to Android from outside the market.

Audiogalaxy

Regardless, this is a huge blow to Grooveshark. I must admit, though, that most of the time it’s not my music app of choice anymore. I’ve been favouring Audiogalaxy, a “placeshifting” streaming music service which runs a “helper” service on your PC at home to pull in your music collection, then streams it through their servers on demand through the website or mobile app. It’s free, but the downsides compared to something like Spotify Premium or Grooveshark are that you are restricted to music files you already have (which must be DRM free to work) and your PC has to be on and connected to the net to stream the music.

Audiogalaxy: Under the radar, under rated?

In essence, I see Audiogalaxy as being like my old MP3 player; more than enough space for all my songs (they claim that it works with libraries of up to 200,00 songs) as opposed to the 2GB SD card currently in my phone; guaranteed quality of the files and tagging, since they’re mine to begin with (my biggest gripe with the frustrating search system within Grooveshark); plus on top of that, I never have to sync my phone and computer to get new tracks onto my phone. I also love that I can scrobble to Last.fm as well. It’s easy to use, allows you to share to Twitter/Facebook, and isn’t bad to look at, especially on the Play screen, where you can allow the album art to take up the whole screen.

Genie mode

One other thing Audiogalaxy does, in an addition to the mobile app as recent as yesterday (and tweeted to me by their resident Twitterer as the update was applied) is the new Genie mode. My understanding is that it’s similar to iTunes’ Genius mode, which I believe has the same functionality, but I’ve never been an iTunes guy so I don’t know for sure. Anyway, Genie mode is like a “smart” shuffle; similar to the radio modes for Last.fm and Grooveshark, it looks at the song you’re currently playing and queues up a list of songs you will probably want to listen to. The difference from the aforementioned platforms is that this is localised to your collection.

Rub the lamp, wish for a similar song to match your mood

I’ve tried it out a few times, and I have to say that it seems to work well. Playing Baroness causes it to queue up songs by Mastodon and Kylesa, for example. For me this is a great little feature because I often feel in the mood for a certain type of music and so must risk walking into things on the pavement as I set up a playlist on the fly; from now on, Audiogalaxy will do it for me. Maybe you don’t discover new music, like with Last.fm or Grooveshark, but it’s still really convenient.

I’m not sure where the data comes from, be it a database of similar artists like Last.fm, but I have to think this feature has something to do with Audiogalaxy opening up their API to developers. I’ll be interested to see what people do with it.

What the big players are cooking up

For now, Audiogalaxy is still kind of under the radar, which may be a good thing after looking at Grooveshark’s outlook (the models are different, yes, but your music files still go through Audiogalaxy’s servers on their way to your device), but I’ve seen it mentioned a few times lately in the comment areas of blogs regarding some future developments from the heavy hitters. By this I mean Amazon Cloud Player and Google’s potential music service. The recently released Amazon service, currectly only available in the US, links up with the Amazon MP3 store as well as users’ own collections to Amazon’s Cloud Drive service, allowing users to play their music on the go. This is sort of a hybrid of Grooveshark and Audiogalaxy, where your files are stored on a remote server, like Grooveshark, while only allowing access to your own files, like Audiogalaxy (although you won’t need your PC to be constantly running to access your tunes).

Amazon has already come under fire from record companies, which was kind of predictable. It seems like record companies want two pay days here: One for you buying the music from them, and one for you using Amazon to play the music you already bought. Google seems to be on the brink of similar “discussions” with record companies as it develops its own cloud service for music.

So who will survive when the dust clears? Will Grooveshark ride the rising waves surround it, especially considering it will be much harder to get new (or keep old) subscribers to a service not even available in the market anymore? Will Audiogalaxy be crushed under bigger companies offering similar services; or will it rise in popularity due to advocates (like me in this blog, I suppose) raising their voices as the functionality is brought to the mainstream? Would this mean the service would no longer be free? Or will Apple shrug off all this competition like it has repeatedly over the past decade regardless of these outcomes?

What do you think?

I’d like to know what you think about this, so please take part in the poll below, adding another answer if none of those supplied applies to you. Leave a comment if you have more to add. Spread it around a bit by “liking” and tweeting this page below this post. I’m seriously intrigued as to what people think will happen!

P.S. Pre-empting people mentioning Subsonic: I’ve tried it, and I don’t like it for the following concise reasons: It’s too complicated to set up, it needs you to open ports to get it to work (Audiogalaxy doesn’t) and it ignores metatags in favour of looking at the folder structure of your collection, which I don’t use. It’s also not free, even if it is very cheap. So if those things don’t bother you, try Subsonic.

First let’s look at the basis of Permission Marketing, as Godin defines it. Traditional marketing (TV ads, print ads, spam emails, cold calls) is mostly referred to in the book as “Interruption Marketing”, where the marketer steals away the consumer’s valuable time in order to try to sell something to them. They try to reach as many people as possible with each message in order to maximize the value of the message, which is usually very expensive to run. This means that in most cases most of the people who see the advert are not the target market for the commodity being sold; those who are in the target range might not get the full message within one advert; and in most cases a single advert is quickly forgotten about. With “Interruption Marketing” in context, “Permission Marketing” is the concept of only talking to people who want to be talked to, when they want to be talked to. This means you aren’t wasting time trying to sell to people who aren’t likely to buy. It means spending your advertising budget on frequency over reach (run the ads in a small/focused market many times rather than once in a large, vague market). To get across the basic reasoning for this, I’ll quote the book:

Frequency [leads] to awareness, awareness to familiarity, and familiarity to trust. And trust, almost without exception, leads to profit… But before frequency turns into sales, it turns into permission. Permission to communicate, permission to customize, permission to teach. And permission is just a step away from trust.

So basically, Godin says that you get best results from nurturing relationships with people to turn them from strangers to people aware of your brand, then into friends, and finally into lifetime customers. It is cheaper to keep old customers than it is to attract new ones. If a customer trusts a brand, they are very likely to keep buying from them instead of going to rival brands. People no longer trust adverts; they trust peer recommendations. An example using social media: the Facebook “like” button, which can be placed on any web page and, when clicked, will automatically send a recommendation for the relevant product/person/anything to your friends, who know and trust your tastes and standards…

Godin often mentions his company at the time, who specialized in email marketing; the basis of this method is to build a list of emails of potential customers, who you have permission from to send emails that are anticipated, personal and relevant to them. Godin explains that email is cheap (or free), customizable, and “the main reason most people use the Internet”. This is where the book starts to feel old. According to Socialnomics, Generation Y and Z consider email to be “passé”, and social networking has become the number one use of the Internet. I’m not saying nobody uses email anymore, or that it shouldn’t be used in permission marketing; I’m saying that you can reach many more people effectively if you tap into social media too.

Godin says that the web is a fundamentally anonymous medium, which is bad for permission marketing; the challenge is getting consumers to give up their anonymity so the marketer can begin to build trust with them and customize their messages. While this was true in 1997, it’s no longer the case in 2011. As my fellow former Salford Uni student/current social media blogger Mark Ledden put it, “On Facebook, everyone knows you’re a dog”, which was part of his post highlighting how the Internet has changed since 1993, when this cartoon by Peter Steiner was featured in the New Yorker:

Mark pointed out that, in the pre-”Web 2.0″ world of the Internet, people could be who they wanted to be, making up “cool” nicknames and signing up as whoever they wanted to be. This did no favours to permission marketers, because in order to really know anything about anyone, they had to ask, and even then, people were not inclined to give away private or personal information over the Internet. Over time though, we have learned to trust the Internet with our personal information. Mark points to Facebook as the best example of people giving up their privacy and anonymity on the Internet and being encouraged to present themselves as their true identity. For better or worse, the majority of people are now willing to sacrifice their privacy in order to connect with other users and customize their online experience. We allow Google and Yahoo! to remember what we like to search for and recommend other things to look at accordingly. We willingly tell LastFM what music we listened to, when and where, so that it can customize a radio station for our individual tastes. We even let Amazon keep track of our buying habits so that we can easily find other products likely to be desirable to us. All of this happens automatically. And it all relies entirely on our willingness to sacrifice our anonymity. Going back to Facebook, even the adverts on each page are tailored very specifically for you, based on what you’ve shared with the world that you “like”! If the permission marketers of 1997 knew about this, they would do a jig on their desks.

I think at this point it’s important to say that I think just because there is a lot of personal information mined about each Facebook user online, this is not a free pass for marketing companies to knock on your door with a sales pitch about golf clubs just because you clicked “like” on Davis Love III’s fan page. Remember, this is permission marketing. Looking back at Seth Godin’s mantra of “anticipated, personal and relevant“, the lack of anonymity on Facebook helps interruptive marketing in the form of web banners and sidebar ads become more relevant to each user. This does not make them personal or anticipated, but Godin points out that even permission marketing must start with an interruption to start the ball rolling.

When you authorize an app or third party service to access your Facebook or Twitter login, you are asked to give permission for that service to access certain information about you. In most cases you will click “accept” because you are willing to trade this off in exchange for the functionality of the service. It would be tempting for the aspiring permission marketer to think “Wow, an open door to send this person detailed personalized marketing messages!” But this is not at the heart of the concept; it’s creepy. Instead, it should be used in a respectful way, as delicately as possible so as not to “put off” the consumer. The usefulness of this personal information is to be subtle and gently nudge potentially suitable consumers towards a particular consumable. From here you can open up a dialogue with positive respondents, and this is where Social Media really changes the game as far as permission marketing is concerned.

Godin and many other marketers advise that it’s important for the consumer to “raise their hand”. This means they are following a call to action; making it known that they are interested in your company or product. They will be anticipating a response. Social media is the perfect platform for consumers and brands to interact. If a company you “like” on Facebook asks its fans a question, and you respond, well, you just raised your hand. If you follow them on Twitter and @ mention them with a question or comment, that’s the perfect example again. You’re demonstrating that you pay attention to what the company has to say. From there, a savvy company will nurture you with further interactions, bit by bit; remember, frequency leads to trust. If you know there’s a real person working for a company responding personally to your tweets, your trust in that company is likely to be pretty high. Everyone loves a mention on Twitter!

So whereas it’s quite normal and expected for emails to be automated, even if they are generated for individuals via mail merges, it’s much more effective for social media to be person-to-person all the way. The clue is in the name – social media! There are all sorts of ways companies can engage with their followers and encourage brand loyalty through social media platforms, person by person. Yes, it is time consuming. Yes, it is long term. And yes, it is effective. The challenge as I see it is managing all of these customer relationships, or that old elusive social media mystery, metrics. Not automating interactions, but keeping track of who we’ve talked to, what we’ve said and what we have learned from each conversation.

Yesterday, Monday 21st March 2011, I received my 2,000th hit to this blog since I started it on February 3rd 2010. To be a bit open about these stats, here’s a quick look into my analytics:

Busiest day: February 17th 2011, after posting “Using a blog as a log book in academia”, with 35 total site views

Top referrer: Facebook, accounting for 104 views

Top post/page: Home page (871 views), but in terms of actual posts, More on copyrights & Digital Economy Bill with 184 views

Top search term: flight of the conchords robots

Hmmm. Oh well! In honour of this achievement I’m going to post the following:

How do you encourage users to interact and contribute opinions and content to a network?

As part of my dissertation, I wanted to know the feasibility of people using their phones to contribute UGC online from an event; this was, for the most part, a technical exercise to see whether or not the technology was “there” and usable. However, I was always wondering what the best way of fostering these interactions would be. Obviously it’s not something that happens overnight, but there has to be a space in place online for this content to aggregate. For my specific project I was most interested in speed over quality; but what is the best platform to let users (customers, fans, advocates etc.) have their say, communicate with the brand and each other, and post content? And how would one go about fostering these actions?

The role of Facebook

OK, so using Facebook for this kind of thing is so obvious that it’s almost embarrassing to bring it up. To me, this seems like almost a lazy way of doing it, but if you think about it, it could be powerful if done correctly. Facebook is part of most internet user’s everyday life (if you believe this infographic posted on Mashable.com), and utilising a Facebook fan page is an easy way to casually feed information to “fans” – although “fans” are really people who happen to have clicked “like” once. It’s an easy way to spread the word about contests, promotions, news, and of course foster discussions on the page itself.

But how loyal do you really have to be to click “like” on Facebook? Are you ever likely to pay much attention to all those updates or ever really visit the page? Maybe, but nevertheless, it’s still stuck within the walls of Facebook and to me feels a bit uninspired. To me, it seems like a dedicated site or network running in parallel to Facebook would be a better demonstration of the brand’s dedication to its fans’ opinions or contributions.

Saying that, I can’t help but call upon trusty World Wrestling Entertainment to counter my own point; they created a dedicated social network in late 2008 called “WWE Universe”, with the capacity for users to have discussions, post blogs and so on. However, the WWE launched a fan page on Facebook and encouraged its wrestlers to use Twitter in early 2010; these have proven so popular (15 million fans on Facebook) that the WWE Universe site was closed on January 1st 2011. As someone who occasionally looked at WWE Universe, I have to say it wasn’t the most engaging website in the world; it was pretty cluttered. There must be something better out there…?

White Paper (Software as a service) vs. Standalone Software

In setting up a social network, without scripting the whole thing from nothing (something I’m certainly not qualified to do), there are two main paths to go down. You can either use an all-in service who host your network for a monthly subscription cost, as well as developing the software it runs on (like WordPress.com, which is what this blog runs on… although, yes, WordPress.com is free), or you can download the standalone software and upload it to your own server, or integrate it this way into your own site (like WordPress.org, which is more flexible than WordPress.com).

In the first category, where the company hosts the site for you, the market leader with hundreds and thousands of networks under its belt is Ning. It features many customisable base themes and seems easy to modify. Competitors include Kickapps and Wall.fm, which offer different benefits based on the ease of customisation and so forth.

In the other category, where you host the software on your own server and the software itself is free and in most cases open-source, leaders include Drupal, Elgg, BoonEx Dolphin and Buddypress. I think the advantage here is that, if you already have a site in place, these can be used to add the social media network functionality into them, especially since your own site usually equals your own pre-existing web hosting service.

As it stands, I’m currently most interested in Buddypress. It’s built upon WordPress, as the name might suggest, except with more community-based features added in. A good example is Ooizit, a music-sharing network for bands and fans. It allows people to make connections, similar to what something like MySpace eventually became, but with a cleaner, WordPress-ised feel and functionality.

Considering the power of WordPress, and the fact I have a degree of experience using it, I am favouring BuddyPress right now. I would love to play around with it and see what’s possible. And going back to the role of Facebook – well, one could always use Facebook Connect to allow users to log in with their Facebook account and share links to their Facebook walls from a separate (BuddyPress-based?) social network.

Next time I’ll hopefully have more developed thoughts and talk more about how these tools can actually be used to get people to contribute!

You can see the results of this by looking at my oldest posts, as I cover the subjects we talked about in class that particular week. Writing these weekly posts (500 words or so was the guideline) was actually a requirement for passing the module, as Helen had actually put a percentage of the overall marking rate into the blogs, so we all had to oblige. Happily, Helen was right to insist on us writing these blogs, as I found it incredibly useful in getting a good mark on my Social Media assignemnt; so much so, in fact, that I decided to use the blog again when it came time to start work on my dissertation. I’ve been told that now, not only are blog posts required for the Social Media module, but also for the MSc Professional Sound & Video Technology and Audio Production Dissertation projects, in leiu of (or maybe in addition to?) the traditional log books. Personally I think students will find this requirement very useful, as keeping a blog about a project has many advantages.

Fostering Discussion

We only had a few hours a week for each module, and so writing these blogs allowed each person to share their thoughts and contribute perspectives with the group outside of class time. Often, points raised in blogs were brought up in class discussions the next week. We also commented on each others’ posts in the comment boxes and spread the posts around via Twitter, as well as putting links to each others’ blogs on our own and interlinking specific relevant posts. Just by looking at my top referrers, I can tell you from experience that people visited my own blog after reading my fellow students’ blogs, like Rich’s, Fiona’s and Mark’s.

I’m not sure if Helen or whoever might be in charge of particular projects is planning on setting up a place for bloggers/students (in his case they are one and the same) to discuss their blogs, but might I recommend using the Hive? This website, built by a Salford student, allows users to create project pages and link their WordPress blogs to their profile, allowing others to keep track of and discuss these ongoing projects. I also understand that completed profiles and project pages are rewarded with cash vouchers. Very worthwhile!

Reference Material

I know when you’re a student, you’re supposed to take notes. You’re supposed to go home at the end of the day and write up everything you learned and keep it all safe for when it comes to writing up time. Frankly, I’m woeful at this. When I look back on notes I’ve jotted down on scraps of paper over the years, it’s a mixture of nonsensical key words with no context, meaningless figures and statistics, blatantly obvious statements, and drawings of cats (or the same cat over and over; it’s the only thing I can draw). This is particularly useless when the time comes to write a report at the end of a module. I know I could have always written notes down in Word or Notepad, but what’s the point? Nobody is going to see it, I probably won’t look at it again, and it seems too much like…. homework.

What I’ve found with blogging is that it’s a much more rewarding form of note-taking at the end of the day. When I come home, for me personally, sitting down at the computer and typing my random thoughts is pretty standard practice; we all do it, from idly updating our status and spewing textual banter with friends on Facebook to answering that famous Twitter question “what’s happening?” in 140 characters or less each time, most internet users (and nowadays that’s most people in general) are accustomed to getting things off their chest through their keyboard.

A huge advantage of doing this in academia is that, when you come to writing up the report at the end of a module, a lot of the work is already done. For my Social Media module, and even my Masters Dissertation, I was able to pull huge chunks out of the blog, dry up the language a little to make it more suitable for a report, and place it into the report wherever needed. For my dissertation I needed to compare a few live mobile video streaming applications and generally see what the current state of the technology was. The most practical way of doing this was to test each one and write a blog post on the performance of each, as I was doing the tests. So when it came to writing about these things in the actual dissertation, I knew exactly what to write and what my findings were, not just from memory, but because I had it all written down from the moment I’d first used each app.

Motivation

Writing a dissertation is a hugely daunting task, sometimes feeling so enormous that it’s too easy to avoid getting stuck into doing it. By posting a (nearly) weekly blog on my progress, I wrote a mental contract with myself to have something new to blog about every week. I felt compelled to do research and read up on my subjects of interest so that I didn’t let my blog slip, partly knowing that I’d made my supervisor and reader aware of the blog; If I stopped posting, maybe they would assume I wasn’t doing anything? Or that I couldn’t follow up with my vow to keep a dissertation blog? By keeping the blog I was demonstrating to myself as much as anyone that I was making steady progress, and the project was kept in perspective.

It’s fun!

Blogging doesn’t feel like hard work. It’s very informal and in most cases (well, in my case at least), it’s almost like a stream of conciousness flowing from mind to screen. I think I enjoy writing more than most people, but even so, everyone has their own opinions, experiences and perspectives to offer, and they are worth sharing and worth reading. What makes blogging rewarding is seeing the hits roll in, finding out where they came from, reading comments, responding to other posts and generally interacting with the rest of the blogosphere. While there is an art to being successful, the most important thing is that a blog is personal and useful to yourself. So have fun with it, play with the layout and explore a little.

Making this softbound beauty was helped tremenously by keeping up with my blog!

So that’s all I can think of to say about the matter for now. But if you do read this and want to know anything more, please leave a comment, or message me on Twitter (@TweetAlexM). And again, feel free to look over my dissertation-related posts.

To me, and I’m sure to a lot of people, £10 a month is a lot. That’s how much I pay for my phone contract. For me to spend a rolling £10 a month contract for something, I need to be using it all the time. I need to know it’s going to work on my device and that it won’t kill my battery and bandwidth (although my data plan means that I’m unlikely to ever have to worry about that). It was while investigating such practicality issues via blogs, reviews and comments regarding Spotify that I first saw the word “Grooveshark” thrown into the mix as a better alternative. What is Grooveshark?

Grooveshark streams music, much like Spotify, Last.fm and probably countless other similar services. It does it ad-supported for free via a web browser, or for monthly subscription you can get a desktop and mobile app for most brands (but not iPhone, unless it’s jailbroken, due to the app being swiftly removed by Apple for legal reasons). I believe the current rate for Plus (no ads, desktop app) is $6 monthly and for Anywhere (mobile) is $9, but I discovered it just in time, as I started subscribing when the whole package was $3 a month. Grooveshark say they will never charge me or any pre-2011 subscribers a penny more for than the original $3 for everything. Great! For that price, which is the difference between walking to work or getting the bus for a one way trip, I don’t even need to use it that often for it to be good value.

But what made me decide to subscribe anyway? What made me test the Grooveshark-infested waters and steer clear of Spotify? Well, I downloaded the mobile app and took advantage of their quibble free trial run. From memory, this is 2 weeks OR 50 songs in length, whichever expires first. You don’t have to put in any card details to get the trial going, it just starts as soon as you log in to the app. This is much more appealing than the “give us your card details now and then go through the effort of opting out before a month expires” trial offered by Spotify.

So what were my impressions of Grooveshark? Mixed, honestly. I’m not sure how the library stacks up to Spotify’s or Last.fm’s but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was smaller. Unlike the other two platforms mentioned, the tracks on Grooveshark are supplied – entirely – by uploads from users’ own libraries. You are invited to point the uploader towards your music folder(s), and there you go, you’ve shared your collection with every other Grooveshark user. This is apparently somehow legal under the Digital Millennium Copyrights Act, in that Grooveshark will take down any violating files when asked by their owners, but Grooveshark have still found themselves in murky legal waters with various labels all the same. A battle with EMI, however, lead to them signing a licensing deal, so maybe they have found a way to prosper using this model.

Legal issues aside,  the fact that all the files are uploaded from user computers is a mixed bag. On one hand there are some gems hidden in there, such as previously hard to find live or bootleg versions. On the other hand, and in the main negative aspect of Grooveshark from my perspective, there is no guarantee of quality or consistency whatsoever. There are poorly tagged tracks, missing tracks from otherwise complete albums, and tracks that won’t even play. There are alternate spellings of artists, albums and songs, meaning you might have to look through two or more artist pages before you find what you’re looking for; And you can rarely play a full album as intended with any kind of ease due to all the duplicate/out of sequence/missing tracks. This is frustrating sitting at home on the browser or desktop versions, but on the mobile app while walking down the street or on a bus or train, it’s intolerable. To be fair, there is the option to report bad files or incorrect tags, but frankly this doesn’t seem to be enough to control the problem.

Duplicate tracks and albums, all spelled slightly differently; What a mess!

While I’m being negative, another gripe I have is that there is no batch option for “favouriting” tracks. There’s a batch option for adding tracks to playlists, or to “My Music”, but “My Music” doesn’t show up on the mobile version. Only the “favourited” tracks show up. So where’s the batch option for that? It’s like…

OK, so I’ve got that out of my system… so what positive comments can I make about Grooveshark? Well, it’s a lot more flexible than something like Last.fm or Spotify. It has an option to turn on “Radio mode” when you listen to any track, automatically queuing up a track immediately after which is deemed similar to the track you are currently listening to. I’ve found the recommendations to not be quite as well informed as Last.fm’s, but over time this can only improve as it gets more users. Speaking of Last.fm, they just announced that using their radio services on anything but a home computer will require a subscription to their premium account. The announcement on their blog has so far received pretty harsh negative feedback for the most part. I think the main reason is that people don’t want to pay for something that gives them very little control over what they actually listen to. With competitively priced alternatives like Grooveshark out there, which not only has the (maybe less refined) radio feature, but also lets you make your own playlists, AND can scrobble to your Last.fm account automatically, it will be interesting to see what shape the music streaming landscape will take in the next year.

Grooveshark also has a prospering community, and there is no shortage of user-generated playlists and recommendations, should you wish to seek them out. It’s also quite a social platform in general, with it being very easy to share links to what you’re listening to on Facebook, Twitter and so on. Another reason I’m pulling towards supporting Grooveshark is their PR system. They have a very hands-on, compliment-taking, trouble-shooting, article-retweeting, bug-fix-announcing Twitter presence (@Grooveshark, of course), and they have only ever used word of mouth over paid banner ads and the like to spread their product. Power to the viral loop! And it seems to have worked, judging by this “Music Heat Map” produced by VirtualMusic.tv for 2010:

Grooveshark now gets more hits than Last.fm, and with the latter's recent snub to non-subscribers, the balance could tip further

So what’s my overall opinion of Grooveshark? I think it’s not perfect. It has a way to go before it’s a refined, user-friendly, mass-appealing platform, and that’s if it survives various lawsuits and potential changes to digital copyright policies. But it has a lot of support and a smart team behind the scenes, who seem to have the right mindset for succeeding in this kind of environment. I wish it was as easy to use as Spotify and as well-refined in its recommendations as Last.fm, but the compromise is a ridiculously low price (for me as a pre-December 2010 subscriber) and access to a whole lot of songs wherever I am at any given moment. I do love walking down the street, having a song randomly stuck in my head, and then actually listening to it a few seconds later. I also love how well it integrates with Last.fm on my phone, meaning that I can quickly read a bio and find events for the artist I’m currently listening to. This is music on the go as it has always felt like it should be.

Grooveshark… You’re all right. Let’s see how good you can be.