Ben Westermann-Clark's dashboard

Hey Shane,

Just a couple questions:

1) When did you upload it?
2) What's the name/info of the tunes you were uploading?
3) What is the Grooveshark account username you used to upload it?

Thanks!
Ben

Hey, what's your artist name? – Ben Westermann-Clark, on November 10, 2009 21:05

We're working on it! – Ben Westermann-Clark, on November 09, 2009 21:08

Hey Enemonius,

If you try refresh this page after you close and reopen your browser, what happens?

Also, if you just go to http://artists.grooveshark.com and try to login with the account info you selected (even though it didn't go all the way through), it *should* work--what happens?

Thanks,
Ben

Abhijith is right--under My Library there is an Import button near the row controls.

You can also go directly to http://grooveshark.com/upload , and let us know if you have any other questions.

<3
ben+grooveshark

Hey BStephenSpeer,

Our search can be funky sometimes, though working to get it right is a kind of ever-continuing project for us. Thanks for the info, and I'm adding it to the quest.

James is pretty much right on the second part: unverified content consists of songs that we haven't been able to doublecheck from an external souce, like MusicBrainz (for example). Whether or not you see the option to display unverified content really just depends on what has been uploaded by our users for that particular artist.

Thanks for the questions, and the kind words.

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ben+grooveshark

Hey Guys,

Unfortunately right now there's no way to make your widgets play automatically by default. Your friends and listeners just have to trust your good judgment and hit play!

This is one of those little features that some people would like, some people would ignore, but as a small team we have to put on the backburner while we try to tackle some of the more core, fundamental improvements that need to be made.

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ben+grooveshark

Hey Again Corey,

Two questions:

1) Could you get me a screenshot of the Grooveshark oil spill? :)

2) Does the same thing happen when you log in to http://preview.grooveshark.com as http://listen.grooveshark.com ?

Thanks,
Ben

Devin - When you start playing a song, do you see the gray buffering bar in the player load all the way to the end, or does the little "circle" (that shows you what point you're at in the song) reach the end of what has buffered already?

Thanks,
Ben – Ben Westermann-Clark, on October 28, 2009 17:55

Hey Corey,

Sounds frustrating, to be sure! When you say Grooveshark "locks", what exactly happens? Does your browser crash? Do you get any kind of error message? Details would be greatly helpful.

After that, when you try to come back the next day and you're unable, what is it that happens?

Thanks, Corey, and hopefully we can get this sorted out quickly.

-Ben

Hi Allen,

Sorry for all the confusion and frustration. I can understand how the RIAA situation is odd, and hopefully I can help clear up exactly what the deal is.

Basically, all the songs on Grooveshark come from users uploading them from their computers (as you know). From that point, they're searchable, playable, embeddable (etc.) to users of the site--similar to how videos work on Youtube. We have a large and ever-growing list of record labels we work with (http://grooveshark.com/labels-list), an entirely separate site exclusively dedicated to helping artists big or small get paid (http://artists.grooveshark.com), and you may have seen recently that we just signed a deal with major label EMI.

Sometimes, though, an artist or label will come across Grooveshark, find music of theirs on it that one of their fans has uploaded, and want it off the site. This could be for a variety of reasons, but if they do want it removed from the site they let us know. What we do is remove the songs, and send an email to the user who uploaded them letting them know that we've done so, what the songs were, and who claimed ownership over the songs.

By default, whenever this happens, that specific user account is prevented from uploading new content. This is to show good faith to the artist or label.

Note that this does not mean you've done something illegal. Your Grooveshark account won't be deleted, and it really doesn't go beyond being unable to upload.

Unfortunately music purchased via CD (or elsewhere) that gets added to Grooveshark can sometimes still be affected, as we have to comply with the DMCA (which you can read more about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_... ).

We're going to look at ways to improve the service for everyone, but especially VIPs overall, but in this particular issue as well. Again, I'm sorry for the confusion, as our main goal really *is* to try to provide a service that people find of use overall.

And we're certainly not lining our pockets--unless dust is accepted as the new U.S. currency anytime soon.

Let me know if you have absolutely any more questions.

-Ben

Hey Rob,

It's still there--just hidden away a little bit. We'll work on getting this more prominent, but in the meantime head over to http://grooveshark.com/upload/ to access the Uploading tool.

Thanks for the question!

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ben+grooveshark

Hey Nick,

We'd love to chat and see what kind of cool things we could do together to help spread the music. We're always looking for new ways to help artists of all kinds, and the best thing to do would be just send us an email: ben AT grooveshark dot com, and start talking. :)

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ben+grooveshark

Hey Karl,

Zeitgeist was/is supposed to be a crazy/cool representation of your music habits on Grooveshark, overall. It's not just you that has it empty right now, so don't worry.

As for the Serba and Montenegro mix-up, you mean that it won't allow your credit card to go through when you try to register for Grooveshark VIP?

<3
ben+grooveshark – Ben Westermann-Clark, on October 17, 2009 19:52