I met some of the Grooveshark during SXSW. After seeing this video where CEO Sam Tarantino mentioned about their plans to get into artist development, I hit up Ben Westermann-Clark, their VP of Communications, to schedule an interview. I emailed him 3 questions to answer…as of course is the tradition.
1. Grooveshark is a successful music streaming site reaching with over 30 million registrants, so why get in the artist development space?
Because our users are always looking for great new artists, and we’d love to give artists the opportunity to reach our users. In the past, our users have been especially prone to engaging with artist promotions that we’ve done. We’ve seen phenomenal success with some of the artist promotions we’ve run in the past from bands ranging to Interpol to Lady Antebellum. While those artists have a great deal of name recognition and a pre-existing fanbase, we were somewhat surprised to see that promotions involving emerging or baby bands were receiving comparable levels of engagement. In spite of the high engagement levels, these promotions were still done on a relatively small scale. We started thinking about what positive impact we could affect on a smaller band’s career if we really went for broke with a promotion and then forged partnerships with other companies to market them outside of Grooveshark. Hence the decision to get into artist development.
2. What are a couple examples of artists you’ve signed and what went into your decision making process?
Right now, the first band we’re working with in this capacity is Quiet Company. We found them the best way that we know how: through our users. We took a look at a lot of the consumption data and identified about 100 bands that weren’t on a label and yet were experiencing an extremely high growth rate in plays. We then ran a few subtle promotions to effectively focus group each band to a broader demographic of users to determine which band would resonate the most. Quiet Company ended up being that band by a very large margin. They’ve got a record coming out on October 4th and while we’re still going to push them to a large amount of our userbase, we’re going to ensure that they’ll be placed in front of the users that have shown a predisposition to liking their kind of music.
We’re not foolhardy enough to think that we’ll be able to subjectively pick out the next great band, so we leave it up to testing, data, and our users–who are ultimately smarter than us, anyway.
3. Do you see artist development as being more profitable than your on demand music service? Why or why not?
The two aren’t actually separate–we take the popularity of the “on demand music service” as the main force bringing value to artist development. Our core business is the on-demand music service, but as that grows so do the opportunities and value points for artists of all sizes. If we can have even a modicum of success in moving the needle for a band online by ourselves, imagine what’s possible with the marketing muscle of a major record label or large independent? Grooveshark is excited to be a part of the way bands are discovered and become popular in the 21st century–and our vast user data is a great complement to all the hard work bands and managers put into that. Our existing label partners have found success in pushing their bands to that audience, and I think that we will too. In the future, we want to bring on as many partners and bands as we can, be it on the label/management side, other music services, etc and utilize that ecosystem to benefit the careers of a myriad of different artists.
If you’re familiar already, poke your head around Grooveshark and give a listen to Quiet Company.
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