Grooveshark - p2p music sharing and discovery
Grooveshark is a yet to be released online music service focused on sharing and discovering new music. According to their website, Grooveshark will distribute DRM-free MP3s via a p2p network. But unlike the previous generation of P2P music distribution networks, Grooveshark plans to improve the experience by ensuring high quality MP3s, compensating artists, compensating users that share their songs, using SongID to fixup metadata to ensure that you get the right song.
We are starting to see a theme develop in the next generation of web media companies - these companies realize that they can reduce their streaming and music acquisition costs by building on top of P2P networks. The users supply the content and the bandwidth - which greatly reduces the costs to the web startup. The startup can then focus on building a community of listeners and making sure that the proper licensing fees are paid. It's not a bad way to reduce costs, if they can guarantee a good user experience.
Grooveshark isn't open for business yet, but their blog is interesting reading. And it looks like they have a pretty decent size team:
