I’ve already embedded a widget on my blog –> to the right. Like it? I did a quick customization in the widget process matching the colors to my blog.

The site is: http://widgets.grooveshark.com/

Below is the widget creation process, pretty easy if you ask me:

Share Your Playlists

Select Your Colors

Choose Your Songs

Put it On Your Blog/MySpace/Etc

I still think a majority of good content is discovered through TV and alternative mediums, music labels just need to find a way to capture this gold.

Napster Learns How to do Subscriptions

Why don’t the Napster folks focus on building their business around other already popular subscription-based offerings. The cable industry manages to bilk you for $100 a month, even though you only watch 20% or less of your total channels. Sirius gets you to pay for radio that you get for free in your car –

If Napster worked on developing better hardware relationships they could really build a killer product. Imagine if Napster created a head-unit for cars, you could listen to any of the music from their catalog on-demand, right from your car. Then, when you want to load up your mp3 player, you simply “star” each song you hear on the radio, and it automatically downloads to your napster player. That’s a pretty cool value I wouldn’t mind paying for, but right now what they are doing is trying to get you to pay for something that you can already get for free, in a better format, higher quality, and from a larger selection — it’s amazing they have any subscribers at all..

Now for the first two, the exclusives make sense. You can’t use an iPhone on Verizon and you can’t watch the Super Bowl on CBS, and after the game is over, the content is pretty much worthless. But for music, the exclusivity lasts only as long as the first song downloaded. As soon as one person buys the song from Verizon, it jumps onto the intranets and is available for anyone to download.

There is no legal alternative

Okay, so now we have the new Madonna song available for download exclusively on Verizon’s network and on Limewire. For users who, like me, who have T-Mobile, I’m not going to sign up for Verizon’s service to download the track. And if I want to legally purchase this track, that is my only option, so by default I’m forced to download the track illegally simply because I have no other option.

So in this scenario, Madonna (and her entourage), have lost out on a sale simply because I have no legal means of purchasing her track. If the track gets released on all the networks a week later, it’s too late, I’ve already downloaded the song from Limewire, and as good of a citizen as I am, it just feels stupid to pay again for a track I already have.

And that is the exact problem Grooveshark is trying to solve: we want to give fans a legal alternative to the illegal networks. iTunes only has 6 million songs in their catalog, and Gracenote has 80 million songs on file, and for the majority of music customers, they either turn to iTunes or Limewire for their download needs.

Where do you stand on this issue? Love to hear from you in the comments –

Anthony from VentureBeat has a great line regarding the current state of the music industry. We definitely would not have seen this amount of cooperation 1 or 2 years ago:

The announcement marks Slacker as part of a growing trend of startups who are actually taking the time to talk to the music corporations, rather than just launching and worrying about the legal details later. (We cover companies taking both approaches in our overview here.) Despite a healthy amount of publicity and more than $50 million in funding, the company is hardly an Apple or a Microsoft.

For Grooveshark, and companies looking to turn around the music industry, this is a step in the right direction.

Do any of you out there actually own a Slacker and can report back?

More from Grooveshark.com at Myxer

Here’s a sample of his suggestions from p2pnet:

Lesson learned: even benign DRM is a bad idea. All forms of friction must be eliminated for authorized file sharing to work.

In Grooveshark, all files are DRM-free in the highest bit-rate available, the way it should be.

If free plays are supported by advertising, and player vendors build easy payment mechanisms into their players, music can be freely shared, musicians can be paid, and fans would never be prohibited from hearing the music they want when they want. Fans will be willing to step up and pay for music they like because it would make the ads go away (to be replaced by artist photos, lyrics, whatever …), it would express gratitude to the artist, and it could potentially lead to benefits from P2P sharing or organized reselling.

Grooveshark uses plays as a promotional piece that allows fans an opportunity to listen to songs on their terms. Fans can just as easily download songs for free from Limewire to listen to them, so how can you force them into 30 second streams if you want them to PAY to download the track.

For more, see their article @ p2pnet

Renegotiating the terms on the loan was a no-brainer, as it’s financially impossible for them to pay back the loan today, and any self-respecting (VC) investor should know that. They’re going to blow through a lot more cash before they start making any real change for awhile now. Let’s just hope they can keep their CEO’s pay away from the $420k range until then …

For Valentine’s Day, we’re giving UF students free $10 in music, conveniently contained in a Valentine’s Day card, which will be taped to the bottom of their chair. They’ll sit down at their desk, read the note, find the card, and BAM! instant satisfaction

2008 will be the year of Grooveshark.