Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’ had been streamed nearly 25.5m times on Spotify by the end of last week, with its weekly streams increasing over the previous four weeks as the song gathered momentum.

How do we know? Late last week, Spotify launched its new weekly charts, the Spotify 50 and Social 50, with the former ranking the 50 most-streamed songs in each of the 28 countries that Spotify is available in.

The chart shows weekly play-counts for each track, and is backdated to the week ending 28 April for every country. In other words, spend a bit of time digging into the Spotify 50 widget (as we have done today) and you can get national and global Spotify streaming counts for popular tracks.

‘Get Lucky’ is a good subject, because it was released on Spotify during that first week – meaning the four weekly charts available through the widget account for all its streams so far on the service. It’s also good, because the song has been such a hit, it appears in the Spotify 50 for every single country for each of those four weeks. There are no holes in the data.

Having typed all the figures in to a spreadsheet (here’s a public version for you to see the raw data), here’s what we’ve found:

‘Get Lucky’ was streamed 25,467,772m times in its first four weeks on Spotify. What’s more, its momentum built over time: 6m streams in week one, 6.3m in week two, 6.5m in week three and 6.7m in week four. Note, if you’re one of the early users who can see play-counts in Spotify’s desktop app, it’s currently showing nearly 29m plays for ‘Get Lucky’, meaning another 3.5m-odd plays so far since the 28 April (the last published chart).

The US, UK and Sweden were the three biggest countries for the track. The US accounted for 6.4m of ‘Get Lucky’ streams on Spotify for the four-week period as a whole – 25.3% of the total. That’s ahead of the UK’s 3.8m (15%) and Sweden’s 3m (11.9%). That means that together, these three countries accounted for 52.1% of ‘Get Lucky’s Spotify streams.

Other notable markets: Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway and Spain. This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise: key European countries where Spotify has been available for a while. Norway accounted for 1.7m streams over the four weeks, just ahead of the Netherlands (also 1.7m rounded up), Germany (1.6m), Denmark (1.4m), France (1.2m) and Spain (1m).

It’s very early days for Spotify in the Baltics. Last week, ‘Get Lucky’ was only streamed 5,657 times in Lithuania, but was still top of the Spotify 50 chart there. Streams are also counted in the thousands in Estonia and Latvia.

Using very rough calculations, all these streams may have generated $127k in payouts. We’re always wary of simple per-stream = X thus artist makes Y calculations, not least because we have no idea what the deal is between Daft Punk and label Colombia Records when it comes to streaming revenues. But if you take the $0.005-per-stream average that’s often cited (for example here) about Spotify, 25.5m plays generates around $127k of payouts.

We can see the negative headlines now: 25.5m plays for the biggest song in the world right now only makes $127k? Streaming sucks!

Maybe not.

One, because as a single-track, ‘Get Lucky’ has sold like the clappers. In the same four-week period in the UK alone, it sold 606k units according to the Official Charts Company, alongside those 3.8m Spotify streams.

Two, because the ‘Random Access Memories’ album appears to have been pre-selling extremely strongly too. In the US alone, it’s expected to sell more than 250k copies in its first week – again, despite the album being available to stream on Spotify and other services.

Three, because the figures above are only for Spotify. They don’t include payouts from Rhapsody, Deezer, Rdio and other streaming services, nor do they include YouTube (34m plays so far for the official audio there).

Four, because people are going to keep playing ‘Get Lucky’ for the rest of 2013 and  beyond. It has ‘summer hit’ written all over it. If summer ever deigns to arrive, that is. Spotify and its peers will keep paying out as long as people keep playing the song.

We’re not blinkered evangelists for streaming music – there is still too much murk around how streaming payouts make their way to artists, and reasons for concern about whether streaming services can find a sustainable business model for the long term.

What’s more, all the data in this blog post relates to one of the biggest hits of 2013 so far from a well-established artist: it doesn’t say much about what Spotify and streaming in general means for emerging artists, which is another point of contention within the industry.

But the really vital thing when talking about streaming music and how it’s paying off or not paying off for artists and music rightsholders is to look for accurate data, and start to draw conclusions based on that, rather than prejudice for or against the streaming model.

In short: here are some hard numbers….

Source: Musically (by Stuart Dredge)

Spotify leads the world’s on-demand subscriptions with six million paying subscribers, but it’s facing stiff competition from a company that isn’t even available in the biggest music market on the planet: Deezer, which tells us it now has over four million paying subscribers to its “premium plus” subscription.

Though you cannot access it from the United States, Deezer is available in more territories than any other on-demand service, according to this data. And like Spotify, MOG, and other subscriptions, it has seen usage increase follow its integration with Facebook, so that people can see what their friends are listening to on there.

At the Music Matters Asia conference on Wednesday, Deezer CEO Axel Dauchez dropped the following new numbers about his service:

• Deezer has over four million paying subscribers.
  
  
• It also has 25 million tracks, which is five million more than Spotify says it has (not all of these are likely available in all territories, in the case of both services).
  
  
• Deezer has 10 million monthly active users. Spotify, on the other hand, says it has 24 million.

If we are to take these numbers at face value, it means that Deezer’s conversion ratio from free to paying is about 40 percent, while Spotify’s is about 25 percent.

Source: Evolver (Eliot Van Buskirk)

Last.fm has teamed up with MUZU.TV today to bring over 90,000 music videos to the Web version of its Pandora-style Internet radio service.

The partnership will add relevant videos to each artist’s profile page, giving users a wider variety of content to ‘scrobble’ – the term coined by Last.fm to describe the act of recording a track as part of your ongoing listening habits.

The videos will be available to European users today, although the company says support for additional countries will “come very soon.”

Each artist page currently shows a short list of the top tracks scrobbled by users through the Last.fm service. Music videos supplied by MUZU.TV will be integrated into this chart – rather than being listed separately – and will also be available on the webpage assigned to each individual track.

On the flip side, support for automatic Last.fm scrobbling will be added to the MUZU.TV website so that videos will always be recorded as part of users’ listening habits, regardless of where they are on the Web.

Last.fm is one of the only services that provides a comprehensive and seamless way of recording everything that you listen to. This data was originally used to recommend new tracks and artists to listen to, using both the Last.fm website and its dedicated mobile apps.

The service has since been integrated into other music services, particularly on-demand streaming alternatives such as Rdio and Spotify. Last.fm has never offered users this sort of control – instead relying on automated playlists similar to Pandora – and has lost some attention as a result.

Last December, the service practically abandoned this service in almost all countries except the US, UK and Germany. Web-based radio listening remains free in these countries, but it’s now a paid-for option elsewhere, as it already is in its mobile apps.

Last.fm doubled its efforts, however, by launching a brand new iOS app called Last.fm Scrobbler, as well as a striking new Xbox 360 app just last month.

The addition of MUZU.TV music videos is significant, but Last.fm needs a serious overhaul if it’s to stay relevant in the ever-expanding and evolving range of Web-based music streaming services.

Source: TheNextWeb (by Nick Summers)

On the heels of Google wading into the music streaming waters with its Google Play Music All Access service, with a $10 fee for all-you-can-eat streamed tracks, the indie music agency Merlin has today published results of a recent survey of its 20,000-label member group, plus an analysis of 6.5 billion music streams over the last year, which spell out where the money is coming from today. Streaming services are making increasing headway as a revenue driver for musicians, but digital downloads — specifically Apple’s iTunes — are still ruling the roost.

Worldwide, iTunes has held on to its spot as the single-biggest source of revenues for Merlin’s independent label members, both across key markets like the U.S. and UK, as well across Europe and globally. Interestingly, Spotify is securely in second position, underscoring just how popular both Spotify and streaming services  have become — second has been a place held by Amazon for some time prior to this. Amazon’s MP3 download service subsequently slipped down to third place across the board, while Deezer and eMusic are split regionally in terms of their influence and in grabbing fourth place.

We’re reaching out to Merlin to see if we can get a specific percentage breakdown here. Typically iTunes has been estimated to hold around 60% of the digital music market by revenues; NPD put its share at 63% in April 2013. (Update: A Merlin spokesperson says those breakdowns are not being disclosed.)

“The new generation of digital services has created a new dynamic of consumer freedom, limitless choice and myriad paths to discovery,” Charles Caldas, the chief executive of Merlin, said today in a speech at the Great Escape conference in Brighton. “Our numbers illustrate that this dynamic is bringing incremental value to the market, and the demand from music fans for the music being released by our independent members is higher than ever before.” However, in what might be a swipe not just at big labels but big players like Google jumping deeper into the market, he also cautioned against companies that might be trying to apply legacy music royalty concepts to digital.

“The ecosystem is fragile: power is more concentrated than ever, and we are seeing an attempted land grab by the largest companies for digital market share as they try to recreate the old-market advantages they are clearly losing in the digital space,” he noted. Merlin, despite its tens of thousands of indie label partners, only makes up about 10% of the world’s music market, so it has a place continuing to rage against the machine.

It will be interesting to see whether Spotify’s (and streaming’s) rise are eating into that 60% marketshare for iTunes. But the research from Merlin suggests that if this is the case it’s not a watershed moment quite yet: both formats appear to still be growing, even if streaming is growing more.

Some 92% of respondents in the survey said that streaming and subscription revenues (based on streaming) grew in 2012 compared to a year ago. One-third said the rise was as much as 100%.

The rise in downloads was less pronounced: around 66% said a-la-carte download sales grew alongside that streaming rise. Only 8.4% said the rise in download revenues increased by 100%.

In terms of what the growth in streaming means for actual businesses, the takeaway is still marginal.

Merlin’s members say that they expect royalties of $65 million or more for 2013 from streaming services, but if you just do the math and divide that among 20,000 members, that works out to only $3,250 per label. Considering that Merlin claims that its members’ share of streaming services is typically 12-20% higher than those of other major labels — included in Merlin’s counts are acts like The National, Grizzly Bear and Bon Iver, as well as labels like Domino and Beggars Group — it sounds like streaming, despite all the advances and popularity, remains for now just an opening act, and not the main event.

Full results of the report can be seen here.

Source: TechCrunch (by Ingrid Lunden)

Google yesterday announced Play Music All Access, a music service with subscription features that competes with Spotify and Rdio — building on Google’s existing music store and cloud service that competes with iTunes and Amazon. That’s a compelling mix of features, but Google still faces plenty of challenges as it attempts to establish itself as a credible competitor in the rapidly changing music space.

“For now, we have a version 1.0 of what’s possible,” Google Play lead product manager Paul Joyce told The Verge. “We had a vision and it’s taken us time to build out that vision. We look at All Access as a complement to the locker, which we felt we had to build first.”

“WE HAD A VISION AND IT’S TAKEN US TIME TO BUILD OUT THAT VISION.”

But while the streaming service came second, it’s clear Google felt pressure to enter the subscription market as consumer music spending shifts. “Music subscriptions are the fastest growing segment of the music business,” said Joyce. “There are people who will always buy music, and people who will always rent. Increasingly there will be both.”

The combination of a store, cloud storage, and streaming service means that All Access is currently unique in allowing customers to browse, play, and manage both purchased tracks and subscription tracks in a single unified interface — something that no other service currently offers. “You can see how a subscription model works with your own personal collection, and if you like it, we would love for you to pay $9.99 a month,” said Joyce. “But if you decide you don’t need all that music, your going-away prize is a free level of service where all your music is safe in the cloud.”

That’s a pretty good deal, and it gets better if you sign up before June 30th — the price falls to $7.99, although Joyce wouldn’t say if it would ever go up again. “It’s $7.99 a month,” said Joyce. “Forever and promises are difficult. But people have the same question about our free music locker.”

But getting people to take advantage of that deal won’t be easy — especially since Google seems to be artificially limiting its potential market by keeping Play Music safely within the boundaries of its own ecosystem. There’s no iOS app, for example, and social integration is limited to Google+ — even though Spotify famously received a huge boost in users by integrating with Facebook. In an increasingly multiplatform world, a music service that only works in the US on a single platform and doesn’t allow for seamless sharing seems seems destined for niche status.

“I THINK WE’RE JUST GETTING STARTED.”

But Joyce said his team is exploring all their options. “We’ll always evaluate other platforms and other opportunities,” said Joyce. “Our general goal is to have everyone use our service. I don’t think it should be a requirement that people have a specific piece of hardware to use our service — that’s not a strategic aim. I think we’re just getting started.”

Joyce also hinted at future integration with YouTube, which has turned into a dominant music service in its own right. “YouTube’s hugely successful and we’re all part of one company,” he said. “Can Google build something better that involves aspects of YouTube with things that Play is doing? I think that’s something we’re all aware of, and directionally that’s likely.”

Source: The Verge (by Nilay Patel)

In an uncommon move to tinker with the formula used to certify Gold and Platinum awards, the Recording Industry Association of America on Thursday announced it has started to incorporate on-demand streams towards its calculations for certifying the prestigious awards.

The change, only the fifth major alteration in the methodology since the inception of the program in 1958, is meant to recognize how important digital distribution has become and how technology has permanently altered the way people access music. 

The last time the RIAA altered its methodology was in 2006, when it added master ringtones. Two years before that, the organization began counting digital downloads. And prior to that, CDs and cassette tapes were added to the mix. Otherwise, the formula for Gold and Platinum certifications remained largely untouched — 500,000 unit sales for Gold, 1 million for Platinum and 10 million for Diamond.

Among the on-demand streaming services the RIAA will accept are MOG, Muve Music, Rdio, Rhapsody, Slacker, Spotify, Xbox Music and others. In addition, video streams from MTV.com, VEVO, Yahoo! Music and YouTube will also count. Under the new formula, the RIAA will distribute awards to 56 new titles, including 30 Seconds To Mars’s “This Is War,” Emeli Sandé’s “Next To Me,” and Cher Lloyd’s “Oath,” Thursday night at the National Association of Recording Merchandisers’ annual Musiz Biz conference in Los Angeles.

For the RIAA, deciding that on-demand streams should be recognized was the easy part. The hard part was in figuring out how many streams should be equivalent of a single sale. The group agonized for more than a year over that question, said RIAA Chairman and Chief Executive Cary Sherman.

If it looked at, for any single song, how many on-demand streams would generate as much revenue for rightsholders as a download sale, the answer would be somewhere in the hundreds of thousands. The RIAA rejected that path because it would be “impossible” to arrive at a number, given that on-demand streaming contracts are confidential and can vary considerably, Sherman said. In addition, such contracts expire and change continually, rendering any formula based on current contracts obsolete in a short period of time.

“We also felt that pure economics should not be the basis for acknowledging artistic achivement,” Sherman said.

Instead, the group opted to rely on average consumption patterns — for every download of any particular song sold, how often is it also being streamed on demand? The answer: 100.

Eleven new songs, including 30 Seconds To Mars’ “This Is War,” Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” and Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games,” earned awards because streams tipped them over the marks.

Source: Billboard (by Alex Pham)

Spotify has patched an exploit that allowed a Chrome browser extension to download any song available on the music streaming service. We have tested and can confirm that the Downloadify tool is no longer able to connect to Spotify’s web player. By allowing premium users to store tracks locally as part of their monthly subscription, Spotify inadvertently allowed the Downloadify tool to grab a copy of any song from its catalog of over 20 million tracks.

Google moved quickly to remove Downloadify from the Chrome Web Store but it is still available via a repository on GitHub. Developer Robin Aldenhoven confirmed to The Verge that the tool no longer works, noting that Spotify had employed a more streamlined and secure protocol that makes it harder to request stored tracks. Aldenhoven also said that the project would not be updated to circumvent Spotify’s new security measures. We have reached out to Spotify for confirmation.

Source: The Verge (by Chris Welch)

Last fall, Twitter bought We Are Hunted, a “music discovery” startup that made a popular app for Spotify.

Apparently Spotify is paying attention: It just bought Tunigo, another music discovery startup with a popular Spotify app.

Spotify isn’t announcing terms for the deal, but says that all of the Swedish company’s 20-or-so employees will come to work at Spotify’s offices in Stockholm and New York.

The Tunigo Spotify app will keep running (there’s also an iPhone app), but presumably Spotify’s new hires will be put to work on Spotify’s main service, which has 24 million users and six million paying subscribers. Tunigo had reportedly raised $3 million.

The We Are Hunted and Tunigo deals aren’t exactly parallel, since Twitter used We Are Hunted to build a brand-new music app, and Spotify doesn’t need one of those. But they do show that digital music companies are putting a renewed emphasis on helping people find stuff they like — which has the obvious benefit of keeping them on the service longer, and/or convincing them to pay for them.

Internet radio service Pandora has always been about discovery, but lots of other services have been content to assemble millions of tracks and ask listeners to poke through them on their own, or to ask their friends for recommendations.

Now lots of companies are starting to emphasize curation. That’s the entire point of Jimmy Iovine’s new Beats/Daisy music service, scheduled for launch later this year. And if Apple is able to hammer out deals with music labels — last I heard, they’re still stuck haggling with Sony Music and Sony/ATV, its related-but-separate publishing company — it will launch an iRadio service that combines elements of both Pandora and on-demand services.

If you have a Spotify subscription and haven’t played with Tunigo, by the way, it’s worth checking out: Like Web radio service Songza, it is focused on mood- and theme-based playlists, and it’s pretty good.

Source: All Things Digital (by Peter Kafka)

How much does Spotify pay artists? It’s the biggest mystery in music. One independent artist claims to have received a measly $0.004 per stream. There was a rumor that Lady Gaga only earned $162 from a million streams. Even indie band Grizzly Bear chimed in to express their displeasure with the alleged slave wages of Spotify declaring that they only received $0.001 per stream. Some have even taken to restricting their music from the service altogether. Is it really that bad? are the payments that low?

In an interview with Hypebot D.A. Wallach, lead vocalist & songwriter in Chester French who works with Spotify as their “Artist in Residence.”, had this to say:

…We make money in two ways. We make money through advertising to free users, who have access to Spotify only on computer. The service is interrupted by ads, and the functionality is a lot like YouTube. There is no mobile option for free ad-supported users, either. Second, we generate revenue from selling subscriptions. In the U.S., a subscription is $120 a year. In the U.K. it is ₤120 a year, and in the E.U, it is €120 a year.

We aggregate all of this revenue from these two streams, and distribute back 70% in royalties based on a pro rata share in accordance with the popularity of a piece of music. For example, if one of your songs has been streamed 1% of the total number of streams in a month, you will get 1% of the 70% of royalties we pay out to rights holders.

According to D.A Wallach in order for anyone to calculate what artists earn from Spotify, in say a month, a few numbers are needed.

1. Spotify’s revenue for the month

2. Amount of dollars Spotify pays out to rights holders

3. Combined number of streams

4. Their number of streams

5. Percentage of overall streams a song accounts for

Being that Spotify is a private company, we don’t have access to their revenue figures so here’s my hypothetical scenario based on real numbers that Spotify has released to the public. According to PrivCo, in 2011 Spotify generated 244 million dollars in revenue. In 2011 Spotify released U.S figures that showed there were over 13 billion songs streamed on Spotify in that year. 13 billion songs streamed doesn’t tell us how many times those 13 billion songs were streamed respectively but we’ll use that number being that that’s all we have.

$244, 000, 000/ 12 = $20,333,333 per month (Revenue for the month)

70% of 20,333,333 = $14,233,333.1 (Amount of dollars Spotify pays out to rights holders) 

13,000,000,000/ 12 = 1,083,333,333.333333 per month (combined number of monthly streams)

20 streams X 100/ 1,083,333,333.333333 = 0.00000184615%  (artist’s percentage of monthly streams)

0.00000184615%  X 14,233,333.1 = 0.26276867902 (artist’s royalties)

0.26276867902/ 20 = $0.01313843395 (artist’s per stream royalties)

So, if an artist on Spotify received 20 streams out of 13 billion and Spotify grossed 244 million dollars, that artist would have earned a little over a penny per stream. It’s pretty safe to assume that the 13 billion songs streamed were listened to more than once and the higher the amount of total streams, the lower the amount of per stream payout for each artist. At the same time, the higher the amount of revenue generated by Spotify, the higher the amount of per stream payout per artist. In addition, Spotify doesn’t accept music submissions directly from artists. As a result artists must submit through digital distribution companies like ONErpm, CdBaby and Tunecore.

Some of these distributors charge up to 15% of sales, from what I’ve seen, and have arranged their own rates with Spotify so what an artist can earn through them varies. For instance, from music I’ve released through CDBaby on average I see $0.004 per stream after their 15% deduction. With music I’ve released through a relatively new company called ONErpm, I receive $0.007 per stream after their 15% deduction. Artists signed to a label may have arrangements that are far less favorable. Aside from the digital distribution and label fees that are deducted from your per stream payout, a 10.2% publishing fee is deducted as well. What happens to that money? Well, I’ll save that for another post.

Source: Music Think Tank (by SF) 

When Grooveshark’s co-founder and CEO Sam Tarantino talks about what happened to his music startup between 2011 and early 2012, he doesn’t hold back: It was, he says, “a year of getting punched in the face 10,000 times.”

During that period, the music streaming service was essentially hit with back-to-back-to-back blows. Google pulled Grooveshark’s mobile app in early 2011, after Apple had done the same the previous year, effectively snuffing out its potential on mobile. Spotify launched in the U.S. in July, 2011 with the blessing of the major record labels and started stealing away Grooveshark’s users. And then came the knockout blow: Universal Music Group filed a federal lawsuit against Tarantino and his employees for uploading copyrighted songs. Sony Music and Warner Music Group joined the lawsuit the following month and EMI filed a lawsuit of its own in early January, meaning that all four major record labels were simultaneously suing the company.

Grooveshark, which had been considered one of the most promising music startups in the late 2000s, suddenly saw its monthly user numbers crash from around 30 million to 12 million in early 2012, according to Tarantino. With the lawsuits looming, he had little choice but to start laying off employees and closing up offices. Grooveshark’s staff was more than halved from 145 to around 60 at its lowest point, with some let go and others choosing to leave on their own.

“Luck comes around in two ways: It comes in bad luck and it comes in spurts of good luck,” Tarantino told Mashable in a recent sit-down interview at Grooveshark’s New York office. “It amazes me how in early 2012 it poured bad luck.”

The situation started to improve somewhat halfway through 2012 as Grooveshark scored a legal victory against Universal. Grooveshark has since focused on keeping costs low and developing new features to stay competitive. In September, it released an HTML5 player to circumvent the bans on its mobile apps, which now has 3 million monthly users and adds 200,000 new users each month. The following month, Grooveshark redesigned its website to focus more on recommended stations and social profiles — similar to Spotify and Pandora. The startup’s user numbers are now back at around 30 million.

Even with these new features and the progress that it has made, the distance between Grooveshark’s business and its competitors is painfully clear. Pandora went public in mid-2011 and now has a market cap of more than $2 billion. Spotify closed a $100 million funding round late last year and is valued at $3 billion. Grooveshark has consolidated its operations to one small office above a dive bar in midtown New York and another larger space in a cheap town in Florida; the company is still fighting to prove to the labels and users that it can and should survive in the changing music landscape and Tarantino says he makes just $60,000 a year and is broke.

“We all don’t get paid a lot,” he says. “I can speak for myself: I am literally broke. I am like literally broke and I am trying to lower my rent.”

On Monday, Grooveshark unveiled its latest big update — user-generated radio stations — which may take it from recovery mode to growth mode. The new feature, which it calls Broadcast, lets users transform a playlist into a live broadcast with the click of a button. The DJ can select songs, record 30-second audio interludes and see real-time listening stats; listeners can engage with one another and offer feedback and song suggestions to the DJ through a live chat feature on the side.

Tarantino bills the new service as a way to “democratize” radio broadcasting so anyone can do it, which is something that he believes falls into Grooveshark’s larger mission to better connect fans with artists. “The same way artists have been broken for years — terrestrial radio — is still the same way you break artists today,” he says. “That hasn’t been uprooted yet.” He compares this to the way that YouTube channels have given individuals a way to broadcast video content to a large audience without having to rely on a traditional television network.

Embracing the radio format for online music streaming may also help Grooveshark to finally negotiate a licensing deal with the major labels, which is of course the black cloud that continues to loom over the company. Tarantino says the labels have “expressed excitement” about the radio feature as it provides it provides an alternative terrestrial stations and he says Grooveshark is now in discussions with the labels, which is more than he could say a year ago. Where were they a year ago? “Nowhere. Being sued into oblivion,” he says. “It’s a much different conversation now.”

Tarantino also doesn’t try to hide the fact that he believes this service could compete head-on with what Pandora offers. “Ultimately, Pandora is great, but it throws people off all the time,” he says. “[Broadcast] is truly the people you trust.”

Of course, Pandora isn’t the only big company Grooveshark must compete with in the music streaming space. Apple, Google and Amazon are all rumored to be entering the market in the future. Tarantino believes this could actually help Grooveshark by putting more pressure on the labels to have “sustainable” licensing rates, but it remains to be seen what kind of impact the arrival of these players in the market would have on Grooveshark’s user numbers.

Regardless of how it plays out, the mood in the Grooveshark office right now is very positive. The staff may be smaller, the brand may be a little tarnished and the CEO may be shopping for discount shoes at Nordstrom Rack because he’s broke, but the members of the team we met all seem to believe that Grooveshark has made it through the worst of the storm.

“It has taken seven years,” Tarantino says. “But here we are at the door of the music industry saying, ‘Look how effective we’ve been with headwinds. Now imagine what we could do with tailwinds.’”

Source: Mashable (by Seth Fiegerman)