Newsletter

Grooveshark: Awesome

I got this email back from Grooveshark a day or two ago, responding I guess not to my email, but to this blog post. Evidently they are either working on or at least aware of the issues I pointed out. Yay.

To: me. :)
Subject: Greetings from Grooveshark

Hey JT,

First off, thanks so much for all your help and interest. Incredibly thoughtful feedback like yours is something we don't see too terribly often, and it really makes my day. We're a small bunch, and we're insanely grateful for you checking us out--and doubly so for taking the time to give us all your thoughts and kindness.

The biggest suggestion/critique you mentioned is the duplication of results in searching/displaying/adding to your queue--which is definitely valid! I understand exactly where you're coming from, not just as a Grooveshark employee, but as someone who uses Grooveshark on a daily basis. Ironically, this is also something we have spent a long time analyzing and trying to figure out the best solution for. We've considered audio fingerprinting, something like CDDB (Gracenote), and various kinds of internal sorting. We made a large push to map many-to-one relationships in our database, so that the 500 copies of Money for Nothing would be collapsed into one display result that is then linked to all the versions users have uploaded. Unfortunately, it was a bit more difficult than we anticipated (as huge database shifts seem to be :-).

Though we're working on ways to fix this (our Editing system is nearly complete), we've been having to focus a bunch of time on keeping all of our servers/load stable and everything generally working.

Other points:

Search! If you do a search for "Honey, as an example, then click artists, it does actually parse through both artist names *and* songs by artists with the given phrase. So when I search for Honey and click on artists, I see Van Morrison (thanks to his song "Tupelo Honey"). The results aren't as refined as we'd like them to be, but fortunately the basic infrastructure is there. But you're still right on about it filtering the displayed songs under the given artists based on the search query.

Favorite Playlist, or add to your queue: I agree!

Autoplay Distinction: Since Autoplay is a pretty new feature, we're working on exactly how we think it should work, in both implementation and the backend algorithm that determines that songs are suitable. If there is any runover between songs recommended during a soft rock session and a jazz session (there should hopefully be very little), you can see which songs you have Hearted or Smiled/Frowned in the past, and adjust how they make you feel during this particular current Autoplay. Also, since we're still gathering a bunch of data on what songs *should* be recommended to other songs, this should get better. We're soon going to start mapping song-to-song recommendations, so the overall feeling of one Autoplay won't be compromised as much as they are with artist-to-artist recommendations (what we have now).

But in essence, songs that are chosen as recommendations during Autoplay are only based on what songs previously appear in the queue for that particular Autoplay. Basically, as you wished, the integrity is maintained because it only recommends based on what you've been listening to during this session, but we still want to make the song-to-song recommendations much better.

Recently Played being actually useful: again, completely agree! We will!

Phew, that was quite a mouthful to type! Hopefully I cleared up some confusion and answered your questions satisfactorily--but I know I get pretty confusing sometimes. If there's anything I was too vague about, or if you have absolutely any other questions, suggestions, requests, bugs, or anything else on your mind, I'm more than happy to help!

Again, thanks so much for everything, JT. It means so much to us, and I wanted to personally reply to your amazing email. Don't hesitate to get in touch with me personally at [email removed for spam harvesting reasons], or on Twitter at http://twitter.com/grooveshark. You rock, and I hope to hear back soon!

Regards,
Ben