TinySong: Simple, Functional, and Social Music

Dan Rua
Florida Venture Blog

June 27, 2008

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 [ http://www.grooveshark.com/ ], a further extension from their GrooveShark P2P community, to their GSlite player [ http://listen.grooveshark.com/ ], 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 [ http://www.grooveshark.com/labels ] and the user who shared that song in the GrooveShark community [ http://www.grooveshark.com/ ].

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?