Flattring artists with Grooveshark
We love music. But we know that it’s tricky to directly support artists on the internet. As a service trying to empower creators we don’t like standing to the side just watching. So we haven’t!
For a long time we have tried to crack how we can help artists to get money for the great music they make. So today we are both pleased and proud to say that the first step in this journey is live. A native integration with Grooveshark.com, the largest on-demand music and discovery service in the world. With 15 million tracks and over 30 million users. This latest update to their platform goes live to everyone today along with a new shiny new interface design.
Meaning, starting today you can support artists on Grooveshark with flattr and be sure that 90% (!) of your money goes directly to the artist!
The best part is that this is just the start. As we didn’t want to create a solution that only works on one single music service we have taking it a step further, this is how.
Bridging the gap between listening and flattring
We think that bridging the gap between consuming and flattring is the way to go. So it’s great that Grooveshark incorporated a simple but yet so beautiful feature they call “Listen and flattr”. When you have listen to a song the Artist will be flattred, automatically.
Universally identified artists
We want to connect artists from all different music services creating a system that flattrs the same artist and song independently of where people listen to it. The solution was to use a universal identifier for the artist. When you flattr an artist on Grooveshark what you really flattr is the Musicbrainz ID of that artist. Musicbrainz is a Wikipedia for music, a crowd sourced, open system. This allows any music service, site, or software the ability to follow the same or similar flattring approach. We think this is the real way it should be done as it connects services and opens doors rather than the opposite.
The unclaimed system in all it’s glory
We know there have been several attempts to collect money for creators that have not yet agreed to receive it. This approach has been proven to be a poor model. So we use our unclaimed system for flattring artists. Until the artist have signed up to flattr and we verified and connected them to their Musicbrainz ID, all flattrs are pending. This makes it possible for fans to show they want to support artists without allocating the funds before the artist is ready to receive them. A pending flattr becomes real the very instant the creator signs up. In the integration with Grooveshark it has made it possible to flattr over 250,000 artists at launch.
Music loves the internet and the potentials we have seen for musicians so far is just the tip of the iceberg, we hope we can help the world get the rest of it up in the air!
Time to get a flattr account, head over to Grooveshark and connect flattr in the grooveshark settings.
