Grooveshark Launches Facebook App and WordPress Integration

Written by Dana Oshiro / June 4, 2009 6:00 AM / 13 Comments

This post is part of our ReadWriteStart channel, which is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs. The channel is sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark. To sign up for BizSpark, click here.

In 2008 Blender magazine named Gainesville Florida the Best Place to Start a Band. With this morning's launch of Grooveshark's new Facebook Share Song application, WordPress plugin and release of their TinySong API, the city is making its mark as a music technology hotbed as well.

Best known as a flash-based streaming music site where users were initially compensated for their uploads, Grooveshark launched in 2007 after co-founders Josh Greenberg and Sam Tarantino met in a University of Florida entrepreneurship course. The two were both 20-years-old and their idea was simple - "to improve the connection between people and music." With its new Facebook and WordPress integration, coupled with the release of the Tinysong API, the Grooveshark team manages to do just that.

In particular, Share Song is an incredibly useful application for Facebook users. Upon installation, users simply type into the search bar and the page automatically updates with a selection of relevant songs from Grooveshark's catalogue of 8 million songs (40 million files). From here a user can choose to send a song to friends, publish to their feed and/or publish to friends' feeds. The process takes about 30 seconds and pending song availability, it's one of the fastest ways to share music within the Facebook ecosystem. Similar sharing services include Share Music and Rhapsody's Music app. Other music sharing applications do exist in this space; however, many require that the user have access to the actual file rather than linking to it.

Grooveshark's WordPress plugin is also an impressive service. Once installed, this service allows WordPress users to post as many songs as they'd like from Grooveshark's library.

And finally for developers, Grooveshark has released their Tinysong API to allow for instant query of the Grooveshark library and shorter embed links to the songs. Social media dashboard Ping.FM is already employing Tinysong as the song URL reducer of choice. Other song-related short link services include Song.ly and MixMatchMusic's Tra.kz.

On the question of legality, Grooveshark has signed a number of license agreements with smaller labels; however, they're still waiting on the heavy hitters of the industry. The group actively pays all performance rights organizations including the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, Broadcast Music Inc. and the Society of European Stage Authors & Composers. Grooveshark also distributes 50% of its ad revenue to copyright holders to ensure fair compensation. Says Josh Bonnain, Grooveshark's vice president of marketing, "The fact of the matter is that while many people access their music legally through iTunes and Amazon, there's still a majority group that doesn't. Our biggest competition as a company is in actuality piracy."

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Comments

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Grooveshark's Wordpress PLUGIN works only for people hosting a server using Wordpress.ORG

But the general masses who use Wordpress.COM as their everyday blog-hosting service need to use the Grooveshark WIDGET (not PLUGIN) http://widgets.grooveshark.com

One tiny problem however: the friggin' widget simply doesn't show up on my wordpress page!

Posted by: theishu | June 4, 2009 6:36 AM

Fair enough, but I think this isn't a shortcoming on Grooveshark's part. It's a common complaint amongst Wordpress.com users that they can't embed flash or javascript. Check out the support page: http://support.wordpress.com/code/

Posted by: Dana Oshiro | June 4, 2009 8:57 AM

Agree. Mentioned it here as this was a very relevant article.

Finally managed to get the grooveshark widget running, btw. Have been trying for 2 weeks now!

Posted by: theishu | June 4, 2009 9:38 AM

Awesome. Congrats on all your hard work. If it's a good work around would you mind sharing your trick with us?

Posted by: Dana Oshiro | June 4, 2009 11:07 AM

theishu, I thought that was obvious. Everyone on wordpress.com knows they can't install a plugin.

Posted by: bob | June 5, 2009 12:34 PM

Come on now Bob, quit hating on a Friday. Not EVERYBODY knows this. That's why they needed the support page.

Posted by: Dana Oshiro | June 5, 2009 1:41 PM

the wordpress is banned our country. can we use this feature?

Posted by: ali öz | June 7, 2009 10:53 PM

Unfortunately you can't use the plug-in without WordPress; however, I believe the widgets are just embeddable chunks of html and flash. You can definitely use those.

Posted by: Dana Oshiro | June 8, 2009 10:34 AM

Yep, the way the plugin works is it does all the dirty work for you in getting the code for the widgets and pasting them into your blog posts. If streaming music is legal in your country you can definitely use widgets.

Posted by: bob | June 10, 2009 8:19 AM

wow wordpress opened now!

Posted by: ali öz | June 10, 2009 8:24 AM

free games and movies

Posted by: gospiele | June 11, 2009 8:41 PM

Can Grooveshark help independent artist sell their music on Facebook ? No

What use is a Facebook music page if the artist cant sell their music

There should be more than just a few options for independent artist to sell their music.

Having the ability to sell music and merchandise should not be just for major artist.

All independent artist should have the ability to easily sell their music and merchadise.

This ability should not be just for the acts that can afford it.

I m an artist www.myspace.com/darkstarline and a technologist.

I have created an application that levels the playing field for artist by giving then the ability to easily sell their music and merchandise.

The site is www.adelph.us

Fans also have the ability to resell their favorite artist music and merchandise and receive a fee for each sell.

adelph.us also has a "Pay me what you want" option

Posted by: william | June 12, 2009 7:11 AM