Startup: Help Grooveshark Craft Their Message

Andrew Wise [ http://wisestartupblog.com/author/andrew%20wise/ ]

January 28, 2008

Our startup, Grooveshark, is currently undergoing a makeover of sorts. Right now the introduction to Grooveshark is “an online music sharing community that rewards you for sharing, reviewing, and discovering new music [ http://www.grooveshark.com ]. Unfortunately, that is not very clear, and might be construed as confusing. As a result, we’re trying to simplify this message and explain to the user exactly what we do.

In trying to find our message, we’re looking at a number of different competitors to benchmark against, here are some of the great examples of simplicity we found:

Apple

Songza

Seeqpod

From looking at these sites, you can see they have a very clear message.

Apple – The world’s thinnest notebook
Sonza – Play any song or artist
Seeqpod – Playable search

Now, taking off of what they’re doing, we’ve come up with a couple of different drafts for the ideal message. Our goal is to tell the user that we have a large music library stemming from our p2p infrastructure, free streaming, and drm-free downloads. We’ve found that most people are not that interested in the downloads phase yet, so we’ve got to sell them on the free streaming and discovery features, and once they’re addicted comfortable with the system, we can get them to download, like the tobacco industry.

Grooveshark
More songs than iTunes. Play any of them for free.

Grooveshark
Listen to any song. Get paid to share.

Grooveshark
On demand streaming. Any song. For Free.

Grooveshark
Stream music, discover music, download music

Grooveshark
Listen to music, discover music, love music

Grooveshark
Listen to any song for free: playlists, discovery, downloads

Grooveshark
More songs that iTunes | free streaming, playlists, discovery, downloads

Hopefully the shotgun approach will work here, as I came up with pretty much every usable iteration of our one concept for the tagline.

Let me know your thoughts on these phrases, and see if anything sticks.