Grooveshark dives into social music sharing

“Listen to any song in the world for free,” invites the home page at Grooveshark, and as far as I can tell, it lets you do exactly that.

I was fortunate enough to meet Steve Spalding and Nate Thompson at Gnomedex, and had a chance to talk to them a little bit about their service. They’re diving into the social music space along with the familiar players Last.fm and Pandora, although their model is a little bit different (and probably a little bit smarter).

Grooveshark plans to make its real money from selling analytics back to the record companies, indie labels, or individual bands who use their service.

They’re also planning to launch a streaming music API and an accompanying analytics API in the next couple of months. This would essentially amount to an out-of-the-box solution for anyone who wants to provide an on-demand streaming music and analytics system to their audience.

Radio stations come to mind.

Right now, the social features are fairly basic - once you create an account you can scan your music library and “mirror” it on their servers (essentially, you can track and stream your music library anywhere there’s an internet connection, so you’re not tied to your hardware), then you can search for your friends and cruise through their uploaded libraries.

Pretty soon, they’re planning to launch what is currently coined “phase 2″ of their social music operation.

This is way cooler, and Spalding calls it the “Facebook approach,” meaning that it is very feed oriented. You’ll be able to get a feed of what your friends are listening to, what they’ve downloaded, what they’ve bought, and other similar activities.

Also, and I think this is pretty cool, they offer a little side-service called TinySong, which works exactly like TinyURL, but for songs.

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