P2P music sharing and sales startup Grooveshark has launched Grooveshark Lite, a flash app that provides access to all the songs in Grooveshark’s P2P library.
For those unfamiliar with the company, Grooveshark allows users to upload and share their music collection with friends, but with a twist: every song uploaded can be purchased DRM-free with the uploader getting a cut of each sale (the rest goes to the record companies, and the service is 100% legal).
The new Grooveshark Lite player is not dissimilar to what Last.fm offers, but without the silly restrictions like being able only play the single five times. It also helps that Grooveshark has a huge selection of music; I don’t have comparable numbers but Grooveshark returned better results on a couple of more obscure searches, where as Last.fm failed or only had 30 seconds of the song. Unlike Seeqpod, another service that allows you to search for and play music uninhibited (and until now my music service of choice), the music on Grooveshark is of a more reliable quality as it’s vetted for sale, although unlike Seeqpod you cant illegally download the track, if that’s how you like getting your music.
The player offers music by artist, album and song title, and is free to use and doesn’t require registration, although registration is required to use Grooveshark services such as playlists and sharing.
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San Francisco/Seattle based music service iLike launched a “news feed” for favorite artists this week. Users can now see exactly what their favorite artists are up to - when they go on tour, release new songs or videos, etc, the news is presented to them in the feed.
Users can select their favorite artiest via the iLike website or on their social network applications. Or the service decides what you like based on your playing habits on iTunes (they have an iTunes plugin - if you listen to a song ten times, it thinks you like the artist).
The news feed for favorite artists can be viewed via the iTunes plugin, the website, the social network applications, or via a new iPhone app (just go to iLike on an iPhone and log in).
The company continues to dominate the Facebook music scene. Their U2 page on Facebook has 1.9 million fans. Compare that to just 168,000 friends on the MySpace U2 page, and 933,000 on Last.fm. The fact that a previously unreleased U2 song was first heard on iLike didn’t hurt those numbers, either.
In July 2007 iLike had 4.5 million users of its Facebook application. Today they have 14 million. But more than half of their new members today are coming from their iLike.com site and other social networks - OpenSocial gave them access to Bebo, Hi5 and soon MySpace. On their website alone they see 3.5 million worldwide monthly visitors, which isn’t bad considering most users interact with iLike via their iTunes plugin, or on Facebook and other social networks. Last.fm, which was acquired last year for $280 million, has 4.7 million.
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SpiralFrog has just announced the site is up to over 1 million uniques each month and expected to end this month with over 1.2 million uniques. SpiralFrog, for those of you who don’t remember, is the free (as in ad supported, not P2P) legal music service that unlocks over 1 million songs to their users as long as they log back in to their site at least once every month (an easy task if you update your library frequently). The songs are downloads and played as WMA files under DRM controls.
While you’d think the main advantage of a download is portability, most people won’t be able to take songs off their computer because they use iPods that can’t play the WMA files. See more details in our earlier coverage.
The songs come from some pretty unique deals with the big labels UMG, EMI, and BMI. In exchange, labels get a share of the ad revenue and affiliate song sales on the site and the comfort of control through the service’s DRM.
However, SpiralFrog was over a year in the making and only officially launched last September. A lot has changed since then. Music prices have dropped, DRM is dead (for paid tracks at least), and new legal/questionably legal sites have popped up to serve up free tunes. Competition includes HypeMachine, RadioBlogClub, Deezer, InTune.fm, Mog, Last.fm, Imeem, and a bunch of other sites. One key difference is that users on these sites stream music instead of downloading it, but that doesn’t seem to be slowing down their growth rates. Imeem, which follows an ad splitting model similar to SpiralFrog, did over 3 million monthly uniques around the time SpiralFrog launched last year. Lets not forget that Yahoo may be treading in this territory as well.
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