P2P streaming music service, Grooveshark, has launched an artist promotion initiative – much like the track placement scheme Jango conceived of – as a means for artists and music promoters to purchase plays on its platform, a direct advertising approach that makes sense.  The Gainesville, Florida, company of approximately 40 young entrepreneurs has created a music service that rivals that of Last.fm and Pandora, the two major players in legal music discovery and ‘free’ music streaming.

Grooveshark claims to have deployed a legal music discovery and consumption model, providing its users with a financial incentive to share music, compensating artist/labels for their respective share of ‘broadcasts’, and maximizing illegal file sharing by financing its original sources.  Whether this service is actually legal or not is questionable and it appears that the company has created an expensive model to sustain on ad revenues alone.  However, they’re coming through on some very interesting marketing features for small budget music marketing campaigns.  At its core, Grooveshark Artists offers pay-for-play audio realestate matched to its existing track recommendations and provides analytics tools for track placement optimization. 

In addition, it has partnered up with some of the most talked about music tech startups for music retail, licensing, funding, and more, including Bandcamp, Sellaband and TheNextBigSound, all under the Grooveshark banner which already includes a number of subsidiary services including Tinysong, a track link generating tool for viral distribution, and  Twisten.fm, a Twitter crawler that finds music-related tweets and links them to playable tracks.  All of this put together amounts to a powerful enterprise of do-it-yourself marketing and a 360 indie approach akin to ReverbNation.

ArtistData caught my attention a few months ago as an excellent solution for updating your gig schedule across numerous platforms, saving much time and ensuring consistency across the board.  The service currently supports the major music-oriented networks, including ReverbNation, Virb, PureVolume, Sonicbids, Indie911, and, soon, facebook, by importing your gig schedule from your MySpace page and publishing the data simultaneously on all of your registered network profile pages.  The service also syndicates the data across a number of concert databases, including Jambase and Last.fm, which serves as a swift and effective live music marketing solution.  ArtistData is limited to gig schedule syndication but reports to be working on other data publication solutions for artists.  Ping.fm, which I learned about on Hypebot today, also provides a data syndication solution but focuses on message posting across multiple sites as opposed to gig schedules.  However, the two services combined may serve as a very powerful set of tools to notify all your fans, regardless of how they are connected to you, in one single blast.