DownTuned

We are currently loving GrooveShark in the Downtuned office – it may well replace Spotify in our hearts as ‘most favouritist music service ever’.

And rather than banging on about how good it is ourself, we talked to GrooveShark’s CEO Sam Tarantino to ask him a few questions about his wonderful app.

Can you let us know the differences between Spotify and your service? Do you have more (or different) artists?

Although there are many similarities there are very key differences. We are a Web app vs their desktop app. They focus very heavily on the consumer while we have put a significant effort and resources towards pushing artists and the back-end. Our fundamental goal is to be able to play any song anywhere from any device. We also have long tail content so anyone in the world can upload their song that they wrote in their garage or the mountains of nepal, get it heard worldwide, and use our promo network to build a fan base around it.

How do artists, especially unsigned, make money from your service?

The key is building their fan base. At the end of the day an artist makes money by building their fan base because it is this fan base that pays for their key sources of revenue (tours, merch, etc). Of course artists and labels are getting a share of our revenue but it is the fans that are the drivers of all those revenue sources. Without fans the artist has nothing.

By treating themselves like a small business and growing their fan base organically, artists can grow their revenues themselves, especially with great tools like ReverbNation and Topspin. We’ve built a system for promoting artist’s music effectively where we’ve seen what is the equivalent of 15%-30% click-thru/action rates. This has been a huge focus of ours as most of our company consists of musicians and we know how difficult is to build a music career.

Where do you see the music industry in the next 5 years? Will it still be an ‘industry?’

The industry will morph drastically especially over the next 2-3 years. In 5 years I see this industry being 90% digital revenues. It is inevitable as what this recession has done is force not just the music industry but ALL industries to innovate and cut costs. The problems that the auto industry, news industry, and movie industry are just the same thing the music industry has been dealing with for the past 10 years, their problems have just been accelerated by the constriction of credit and cash.

The decline in demand for physical content cannot sustain the costs of delivery. This is a reality all these business have in common and the beauty of technology is it can cut costs and gives the consumer what they want. Everyone wants music (or any content for that matter) everywhere at anytime. This has been the elephant in the room for the past 10 years since Napster. The thing about elephants is that it takes a mouse to move them.

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