All About: Grooveshark Broadcast Radio - Be your own Online Streaming Radio DJ

Robot based radio does not add enough variety and Grooveshark Broadcast uses the wisdom of the crowds to create the best possible radio station, infusing new music direct from other listeners.

Just to be clear Grooveshark is Awesome! It provides a great online music streaming service to play virtually any song ever! It also creates a nice community of users to interact and 'follow' one another. Since 2006 Grooveshark has made it apparent that they are not for the traditional audio ads that online radio has traditionally seen. The only ad's for Grooveshark users are the  visual banner ads on some pages of the site. This is really neat to break away from the pandora/spotify type online music streaming services. In fact Groovesharks' CEO want's to disrupt the entire business model of music as we know it, making it 100% free to listen to and only paying for concert shows. A neat idea, but who knows if the artists will fully support this and it will really work.

That's Grooveshark! Free, online streaming music. Recently however they made it possible for anyone (you and me) to make our own 'radio station' for other online grooveshark users to listen into. How neat is that? Instead of some algorithm determining what to play next, a fan of a certain genre of music decides. Or if you are listening to the station, you can make song suggestions to play next, or vote on other song suggestions to encourage the DJ to play them. How cool! It's like a Wikipedia for Radio, crowd-sourced selections always playing the freshest beats! Finally, Grooveshark Broadcast takes the music selection power away from the communist robots (Pandora, Spotify, iHeartRadio etc.) and gives it back to the people that matter; The Listeners!

Oh yea, and no need to call into the radio station and beg them to play your song, just search and add it to the suggestion list (Talk about band promotion!). Want to hear it right way? Just click the play button and preview the song! Each suggestion and vote, you are helping co-pilot a radio station and enjoying some of the music you like at the same time!! Unfortunately there is a limit on the number of suggested songs for a radio station, so if a DJ does not play suggestions, the list of songs can be queued up and not allow for additional suggestions...LAME!

As for popularity, there are hundreds of listeners listening to a variety of stations. The top genres include Dance, Indie, Electronic, Rock, Dubstep among many others. Don't see a station you like? Start your own and play whatever you want. Just the other day I made a station playing Dave Matthews Band Music 24/7. After about an hour, nobody else had joined, so I shut the station down. Maybe one day it will be back! Either way it was a really neat experience to be in the hot seat playing the tunes I love the most with the possibility that others will tune in to listen, chat or make song suggestions!

Being a DJ
This online DJ radio station service may have been seen before back in the Winamp days, where you could do practically the same thing, only now it's from a browser, and you don't have to have the music on your computers hard drive. This could really take off, in a world where pandora-fied music becomes so routine and unable to add a fresh mix into the music all the time. Here live DJ's and other 'experts' can suggest a randomized playlist while introducing hundreds of new artists with a fresh look.

While using this service for the past few weeks, I came across a few ideas to make the service more user friendly or increase revenue possibilities.

DJ Ideas
As a DJ, it would be great if you could have two additional features;

1. The ability to have suggestions from grooveshark on what to play next. Essentially adding a robotic music finder to assist the DJ in his music selection
2. Allow the current DJ to pass on the reigns to a listening user, so they can take over being DJ for the station. Update: They might currently allow this.

Broadcast Revenue
Revenue wise, I think there are a bunch of ways to monetize radio stations with a few hundred or thousand users. Here are a few ideas:

• Artists could 'pay-to-play' a song on a specific genre radio station for hundreds of listeners to hear if the DJ of that station liked it and wanted the listeners to hear it
• A radio station playing only local or unknown bands where the bands promote their nearby shows in the ad's on the page
• A DJ could have the option of playing a public service announcement or audio ad to it's users to generate income for the artists it is playing but leaving the option for users to enable or disable the feature

Broadcast Community
In general, a radio creates a sense of community and this is essential for a radio station to survive. A few ideas to create a community would be:

• The ability for a DJ to record an audio clip from their microphone to introduce themselves and the station to connect with their audience. The Listeners could enable/disable these updates if desired. Implemented!!!
• The ability to ask polls to the listeners to see what other types of music they are interested in or areas of interest in their life they enjoy
• The ability for new/potential listeners to search for a radio broadcast playing an artist or similar artist
• The ability to easily announce sport events or live radio broadcast of any real time event, including TV shows, news events, E-gaming events,  personal interviews or group discussions!

To conclude, this Grooveshark broadcast feature is really neat  because it allows for a rapid and direct way for individuals to have an influence in what others listen to. This also allows for others to bring original music suggestions to  broaden one's horizon of the music they love. Let's hope that users continue to benefit from it and it opens up new possibilities into radio as we know it. Imagine the potential this has for entering into the airwaves and into cars! That's Dope!

P.s. If there is one broadcast station that stands out among the rest it has to be: One-Eyed Sasquatch Radio created and DJ'd by CaptainKevman. This station provides all that is good in the world of indie/folk music! The DJ is very open to suggestions and does a great job of creating a community around the music and it's listeners!

P.p.s. The ability to create a decentralized broadcast system is very powerful! For example, Youtube could do something similar, rather than just playlists, they could create a real time streaming site just for youtube videos being organized by a single user with a common theme, with suggestions from other viewers. Essentially this would be a TV channel, but a better youtube experience, because it would organize the commercial ads and minimize down time looking for a new video.