Wise Startup Blog

Working at Grooveshark, we’ve long been the underdog in the startup music game, and I definitely don’t think things have changed for us, but after 2 years of hard work, we’re finally starting to see some of the fruits of our labor. Rhapsody is spending $50 million on their new DRM-free campaign to try to get users to use their antiquated service, and I think it really puts into perspective exactly how much value Grooveshark provides with such little investment.

I’ve stacked Grooveshark up against two of our (many) competitors, Lala and we7. Both of these have a good amount of funding, an experienced management team, a celebrity spokesperson, yet both of these sites are trailing us in traffic. While the graph used below are entirely representative of world-traffic, and I have no numbers to share with you on advertising and sales revenues for the companies, the experiment still holds merit and proves a point.

grooveshark (red) lala (blue) we7 (green)

Startup Analysis: Lala, Grooveshark & we7

Lala
Their CEO is a veteran startup entrepreneur and Lala is his 7th startup. Lala has raised ~$9 million in disclosed funding from Bain Capital & Ignition Partners. Bain Capital is behind the recent ClearChannel $18 billion acquisition and carries a tremendous amount of weight behind them.

we7
Their founding team includes Peter Gabriel, which bestows a huge amount of music industry cred on the startup. They have raised $6 million from Eden Ventures and Spark Capital (the folks behind Veoh, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.).

Grooveshark
The founders just turned 21, we have raised ~$1 million, we have private friends, family, and and fools for investors. Our team has 0 experience running a startup and the majority of our developers are still in school. I happen to be on the team, so that may be the reason for the huge traffic difference (kidding).

Let us know in the comments why it is that Grooveshark seems to be besting these other two companies in terms of traffic.