grooveshark_hn

Hey ScottWhigham, thanks for the kind words. We've made a couple suggestions on how to use the data in our faq at http://beluga.grooveshark.com/faq.html. We want to offer musicians like you tools such as Beluga to help you connect with your strongest would-be fans. In fact, Beluga is just the beginning. We're building an awesome new platform for artists like you to manage content, connect with fans, and get more out of Beluga all within the main site (grooveshark.com). You can sign up for an early invite at http://greenroom.grooveshark.com/?beluga

Hey physcab, good to hear from you! We miss you, and we hope everything's going well.

We addressed some of your questions in the faq, especially different ways that artists can use Beluga: http://beluga.grooveshark.com/faq.html. Essentially we wanted to give artists a powerful - yet free - tool to let them understand their fan base.

As for data accuracy; although Beluga constantly surprises us with its insights, further investigation has always confirms those insights, at least as far as being solid statistics.

We toyed around with a lot of ways of displaying the data before coming to the final design. Oviously not everybody's going to know what a z-score is, but hopefully the interface is useful for those who don't and even more useful for those who do. We sprinkled helpful tooltips throughout the app to give some context to what's being displayed.

Thank you for your thoughtful feedback!

Hey burrokeet, aspects of the content management functionality you mentioned will be part of the new artist platform. You can request early beta access here: http://greenroom.grooveshark.com/?beluga

We do pay royalties to licensed content holders - please email licensing[at]grooveshark[dot]com for more details

Glad to hear it's working for you. Thanks again for your feedback :)

We really like using aquatic references at Grooveshark, and since the beginning this project's code name was Beluga. We really liked the name, and, since Facebook absorbed the Beluga you're referring to for their talented employees, we decided to keep the name.

Hey gmig, thanks for checking out Beluga. I just tried in Firefox 13, and I couldn't reproduce the issue. Do you have anything that could be messing with your referrer, like addons? On api calls, as a safety precaution, we check to make sure the browser referrer is correct.

Thank you! We hope that this data can help independent musicians connect with their fans more confidently.

We'd love to hear what you guys think. Everyone at the office spends all day on hacker news :)