My Interview with Ben and Steve from GrooveShark

Today I had the pleasure of skyping with Ben and Steve, two of the guys behind GrooveShark, a new (still in beta) site that has some interesting ideas about p2p music sharing, sales and discovery.

In this interview we get a nice overview of the GrooveShark business, a look inside their corporate culture and then chat about pirates and labels and the future of music as we know it… kinda.

Interview with Ben and Steve from GrooveShark

GrooveShark Has a Groovy Model

My very first read every single day, the Gainsville Sun, has a look at GrooveShark, a young company trying to find a legal, for-profit model for p2p music.

“The Grooveshark system works on the basis of a peer-to-peer music sharing system, Greenberg said. Users can upload their personal music library to the Web site.

To legalize the process, the user must buy a song if they want to add it to their collection, he said. Part of the profit is then deposited into the account of the person who uploaded the song to Grooveshark.

In this way, the sharing of an illegal music system is paired with the legalized purchase with the added benefit of compensation, Greenberg said.”

Not sure I totally get it but I’m going to check out the site and see if it all becomes clear.  Either way, it is so cool to see new thinking in this arena.  It is guys like this that will revolutionize the music industry.  Not Universal or EMI.

UPDATE: Christopher Suter, a developer at GrooveShark wrote in to say:

“To clarify, absolutely no purchasing of songs is necessary in order to join Grooveshark, share music, or use our free full-length streaming service. The option to download anything anytime does carry a price of $.99, of which the standard statutory cut goes to rights-holders.

Grooveshark is going to be in a state of constant, rapid improvement over the next few months, so stick around! “