Wise Startup Blog

Part of our Grooveshark Labs, our team is developing Grooveshark Direct Download cards that are designed to eliminate the cost of printing and, even carrying CDs for the artists, and they allow artists to easily sell their music, and make a lot more money on each sale.

A lot of people aren’t buying CDs any more, so instead of selling your fans a CD they’re just going to rip to their iPod, why not cut out the middle man and give these guys just what they want – the mp3s? This saves the artist cost in printing, and also makes their fans a lot happier, as well as being eco-friendly

For those fans that still buy CDs, great, still keep some CDs on hand, and charge a premium for those, but for the rest of your fans, sell em the Grooveshark CD cards.

Here’s how it works:

1. Artist uploads their content to our server
2. Artist sends in artwork and we design the cards
3. Artist sells their CD cards at shows
4. Fans go to Grooveshark.com/CD to download the tracks

As this is a pilot, we’re starting off with 100 cards free, and maybe more, if you ask, to get an idea of what kind of response we’ll get.

We’re still building this, so the site isn’t up yet, but we’ll be sure to keep you posted once it’s ready to go.