Twisten: Listen to Twitter

Did you know you can listen to Twitter?  Yes, listen -- or better yet, twisten.  Thanks to yet another innovation from the script kiddies over at free music monster Grooveshark, you now can.  The idea reminds me of Coke's old commercial "teach the world to sing in perfect harmony," with Twitter as the grand stage.

All the songs good enough to tweet

Twisten.fm allows you to easily share songs and constantly scans the twitter stream, looking for songs people have shared via tinysong or other tweet tools -- those song-sharing tweets are counted as "twistens".  Those twistens are then listed at twisten.fm, organized as tweets by yourself, friends or everyone.  As usual for anything Grooveshark, the site has a nice, clean design.

Play on-the-fly

However, twisten.fm isn't just a list of songs you should go find.  You can actually click a PLAY arrow on every twisten to listen on-the-fly.  You can also click the tinysong link, to play it via listen.grooveshark.com.  That's what I do when I find something I like, because I can then click "Autoplay" to get an ongoing stream of similar music.

Additions I'd like

The service has barely even launched, but I've already got requests that I either missed or I'd like to see added.  First, I'd like to see some popular lists, built from twisten votes.  Similarly, I think a leaderboard of twisteners could encourage sharing and explode Grooveshark's growth.  I'd also like Autoplay built-in to twisten.fm so I could listen to a continuous stream of shared songs, maybe prioritized by twisten votes.

Even without these additions, twisten.fm is a compelling, new service creating value from the intersection of Twitter and Grooveshark.  Twisten should accelerate Grooveshark's already impressive growth, but could be a powerful service in it's own right: twitter, for music.  Great work, G-crew!

Oh, and when you share your first twisten, don't forget to thank @danrua for the heads-up ;-)

Oh, oh...and here's that Coke commercial, just in case I lost you from the start...

TinySong: Simple, Functional, and Social Music

I love when a product does what it's supposed to, elegantly, and with little additional, complicating function. That is an attribute of many successful products including the original Google search box and Twitter.

I ran across another example recently: tinysong.com

TinySong was created by the music-heads over at GrooveShark, a further extension from their GrooveShark P2P community, to their GSlite player, and now to full-on music sharing across the broader social graph.

Just as TinyURL allows you to shorten long URLs for sharing in Twitter and elsewhere, TinySong does the same for sharing songs for immediate streaming. Although you could argue that TinySong is just a subset of TinyURL (e.g. you could use TinyURL to do the same thing), I see two distinct benefits:
1) Sharing a TinySong.com URL makes it clear to others they are about to click on a song; and
2) TinySong integrates music search, playback and sharing automatically.

The service works as follows. Go to tinysong.com and type in a search term for a song (e.g. artist, title). I chose "party ben":

Select the song you want to share from the search results. I chose "Another One Bites Da Funk" a mashup of Daft Punk and Queen.

Share that tinysong.com URL with others. I shared via Twitter:

Clicking that tinysong.com URL (try it now http://tinysong.com/Aaj) immediately starts playing the song and sharing other details. From here I can listen, playlist, queue for later, share the song further and even download the mp3 for a small fee that GrooveShark splits between all rights holders and the user who shared that song in the GrooveShark community.


So what does GrooveShark get for providing such a nice, little service? New users are exposed to Grooveshark every time they listen to a shared song. The quality of the GrooveShark lite player also guarantees a portion of those visitors will search/play other songs and join the GrooveShark community long-term...

Now I wonder, how long will it take for Twitter, FriendFeed, Twhirl, Spaz or some of the microblogging clients to incorporate TinySong for sharing songs and playing them in-line with a GSmicro player?

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Grooveshark = Legal P2P or Napsitunefacepedia

So I'm sitting here listening to "Don't Cry Out" by Shiny Toy Guns and it makes me want to buy. I discovered it via Grooveshark's Billboard of the top songs across their network -- and now I just bought with one click.

Now I'm checking out "Forest" by System of a Down and it reminded me I need to add a few SOAD songs to my collection. I was reminded of SOAD by Grooveshark's Recommendation engine -- and now I just bought with another click.

When I buy these or others, the copyright holders get their cut, the Grooveshark member that contributed the song gets a cut, I pay for a song I like legally and Grooveshark gets their cut and some happy members. I love crowdsourced capitalism done right, everybody wins.

I've been lucky enough to watch Grooveshark grow from a logo on a napkin (maybe it was an idea, but the smooth logo wasn't far behind). Sam, Josh, and Andres have grown a smart, talented team and a small army of developers -- in Gainesville's tech scene, Grooveshark exhibits many signs of a cult, in a good way.

I've seen part of this movie before -- when Shawn Fanning was programming/sleeping/programming in his uncle's office, Sean Parker was hustling money to pay for a second server and a smooth cat wearing headphones became the logo of the Napster revolution and RIAA enemy #1. My fund's investment paid for that second server. What happened from there disrupted an industry in the truest sense of the word, and the walls keep coming down.

That leads us to Grooveshark, the truest implementation so far of Napster's potential to leverage P2P and benefit all participants -- including copyright holders, consumer distributors and music lovers. There are plenty of hurdles ahead but the team is doing a lot of things right. They've gotten great underground coverage and just got a short/sweet TechCrunch review (at least my rare beta invite to Arrington wasn't wasted).

There remains an argument whether music will ultimately be free. I don't know that answer, but I hope not. I'm a strong believer in personal/intellectual property rights (e.g. the right to expect payment for something I create) and the trend I see toward expecting free worries me. Regardless of how that plays out, Grooveshark is well positioned as a blend of Napster (the original), Wikipedia, Facebook and iTunes. Kudos guys, for a good launch so far. I look forward to the day when every song on the planet, including hits, long-tail, remixes, concert recordings, indies and mashups, is available via Grooveshark and everybody gets paid...

Related images: grooveshark, grooveshark logo, sam tarantino, josh greenberg, andres barreto, napster, napster logo, shawn fanning, sean parker