Way back in the day, which will be my temporary claim to music business fame for the time span of you reading this article, I randomly came in contact with Jack DeYoung, Grooveshark’s current VP of label relations through my music blog (currently defunct, but rebuilding and relaunching very soon!).  Back in ’08, Grooveshark was a budding start up with promise, and I was very curious.  Before long, talks switched from my blog to my record label I’d started with a collegue.  Trying to get our bands on this new Grooveshark database, since the premise sounded pretty promising.

Long story short, our record label kind of stalled out, with most bands moving on to grad school, or one man white rapper world domination attempts, and we morphed our label into a non-profit art and music collective that is still thriving today.  But with that change, I lost touch with Jack and the Grooveshark gang.  Little did I know they’d explode into one of the largest music streaming sites today with 30 million unique visitors a month and over 7 million songs in their database.  I mean, really?!  Good for them though.  They’ve truly turned heads in the music industry and proved streaming could really work if done right.

And now they’ve taken yet another step in proving they’re much smarter than your streaming music company by teaming up with Rocket Science, a digital do-it-all group formed in 2004 that has provided bands that major label experience in the digital world, without ever needing a major label in the mix to pull it off.  It’s a no brainer a company like this should exist in our new digital music industry, as the importance of physical labels has diminished, they were the ones that were just smart enough to actually make it happen.

It is an interesting collaboration that I’ll be following closely over the next year as they start to take on more and more bands.  What I enjoyed most about it initially was the fact that they’ll be mainly choosing bands from Grooveshark’s database.  Bands that have proven themselves on Grooveshark by doing something different and making a name for themselves in the digital world.  They aren’t necessarily taking on bigger, already established bands who have decided to break away from major labels and try the digital route.  They’re instead taking on bands that have started with the digital route, been creative enough to be successful in the digital music realm without a label, and who are now being rewarded by being taken in by Grooveshark, who can give them major exposure, and by Rocket Science, who have proven to be digital marketing gurus, accomplishing everything a label would, without all the clutter of signing song rights away or needing whole departments to do something one person could do.

Just thinking about what this collaboration could do for a band, I’d be first in line to have my music thrown around the net by this collaboration.  And any band/musician reading this should be just as excited as me.  Your feeble attempts to contact Jack and get Grooveshark to feature your band may end in temporary failure, since I imagine they’re going to be super selective with who they first represent, but where the first few find success, many other copies shall follow.  And for this dying industry, who are desperate for a solution but too stubborn to listen to suggestions, it’s up to forward thinking companies like Grooveshark and Rocket Science to take the lead in the new digital music revolution and prove we don’t need labels for a band to succeed.  And how sweet it is to see the emergence of great ideas and business models, which major labels initially rejected, now rapidly gaining traction.  Replacing those very labels and proving them to be oh so gloriously obsolete.

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