Grooveshark Launches Beluga – Free Tool For Collecting Fan & Musician Insights

Despite ongoing lawsuits with major record labels and music publishers, Grooveshark is looking to diversify its product offering with the launch of a free music information tool called Beluga. Beluga combines Grooveshark’s in-house market research with the streaming service’s own data, providing music insights and allowing anyone to conduct in-depth research about a particular artist and their fans – completely free and with no registration required.

With Grooveshark's 20 million unique monthly users, Beluga conducts analysis to find correlations between artist affinity and their listener's demographics, location, and survey responses. The insights themselves can be very specific. For instance, Beluga shows that on average, a particular artist’s fans tend to have iPhones, have no pets, prefer Flickr to other social networks, and tend to be students or otherwise work in the tech industry as developers/programmers. That sort of highly detailed data is fantastic for artists and for marketers in particular.

Beluga can help find statistically significant correlations between listening habits and brands, providing insight into what is trending in digital music consumption. Moreover, it can help in identifying typical demographic and psychographic characteristics of an artist's or brand's target audience.

"Any artist with music on Grooveshark can leverage Beluga's revolutionary data to learn about their fans, route their tours, sell merchandise, work on building a following, and take their careers to the next level," said Josh Greenberg, Grooveshark Co-Founder and CTO. "Beluga opens doors for advertisers and brands to partner with artists who connect with their target audience, presenting endless opportunities. Best of all, we provide all of this market research information entirely for free."

Beluga is said to collect data with transparency while still keeping user identities anonymous. It is the first big step in Grooveshark's broader goals for developing products and services that seek to empower artists. 

Artists can sign up for Beluga here.

Hisham Dahud is a Senior Analyst for Hypebot.com. Additionally, he is the head of Business Development for Fame House, LLC and is an independent musicIan himself. Follow him on Twitter: @HishamDahud