“Inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity are the key behaviors of ADHD.”

I was diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) at the age of 16.  I don’t presume that music listeners at large suffer from it but rather draw the comparison to the syndrome due to the endless choice and ease of switching from one piece of music to another ? impulsively.

With terrestrial radio, I can always ‘turn the dial’ but I’m otherwise passively engaged.  As I’m no longer willing to be spoon fed music and advertising by terrestrial radio, I consume it interactively online or via cable or satellite.  I listen to whatever I like, whenever I want, on any device I choose.

Consequently, I’m busy running my music applications and managing my playlists instead of sitting back and just listening.  I’m the DJ.  I’m the station.  I’m not listening like I used to because I’m busy broadcasting to myself…  rating, sharing, editing, remixing, collaborating, plugging in, adding plug-ins, logging off, connecting elsewhere.

I’m not sure that this is a good thing for someone with ADHD.

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Music discovery and playlist service, Grooveshark, was selected as one of ten winners in CNET’s 2009 Webware 100 in the “Audio & Music” category, sharing the spotlight with the formidable usual suspects including iTunes, AmazonMP3, and Pandora.  This is indeed a privilege for the Floridian upstart which triumphed over CD Baby, iLike, Sellaband, Jango, and other well publicized and funded music dotcoms.  Nearly 630,000 votes were cast this year.

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Brian Hazard of the Music Think Tank published a comprehensive post addressing the pay-for-play model that online streaming playlist service, Jango, adopted as part of its monetization strategy, dispelling the analogy to terrestrial radio payola and drawing references to mainstream advertising mediums.  In March, I promoted Jango Airplay and touched on the controversial issues Brian addresses in his piece but his first-hand experience and engaging write-up of the music dotcom serves the topic more justice: Is Jango Payola?

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Interview with Jon Mitchell, UK Director of Sales at Spotify.

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“When we launched our free digital distribution service, we knew we would be able to provide our users with new possibilities to help them expand their own marketing. With Jango Airplay, our users can freely invest into getting radio promotions and establish unique social interactions with new fans to help drive music sales. We are very excited to be working with Jango to provide an effective marketing avenue to our users.” said Kevin Rivers, Founder and CEO of WaTunes.

“We designed Jango Airplay to give emerging artists an affordable and effective way to get their music proactively played to real listeners who like similar music. Thanks to WaTunes and affordable technology it is cheaper than ever to produce and sell music – but getting your music heard is the first step. We are very excited to bring WaTunes users in front of our 6 Million listeners. ” said Mattias Stanghed, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Jango.

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Just discovered a quirky new site for music and music video discovery called YouMusic.  Under the strapline, Make Music?  Find Fans!  Love Music? Find Talent!, the site crowd sources its content from artists and allows music consumers to rate what they hear and see.  There’s a music chart, gig schedule, contest and other community and artist opportunity bells and whistles.  I wonder how much the YouMusic.com domain is worth?

Spotify, the streaming music service, announced last Thursday that Paul Brown will take on the role as the company’s UK Managing Director on April 20th.  It appears as if Brown was headhunted from Pandora where he served as Managing Director International.  Formerly at Sony Music UK where he contributed to the company’s digital music expansion and currently a Non-Executive Director at artist funding site, Slicethepie, Brown is the ideal candidate to spearhead Spotify’s operations in the UK where the uptake to the service has been “phenomenal”, Spotify noted on their blog.

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.

The “what kind of Christmas are you hoping for?” playlist is YouLicense’s third playlist theme, preceded by “what’s your weather?” and “what mood are you in?”.

Lots of fun.

There are tough times ahead for the economy, but our listenership is growing rapidly, the Internet radio royalty rate resolution seems finally near, and the explosion of mobile devices like the iPhone are opening up a world of opportunity for internet radio to expand off the desktop. Moreover, our ad sales are growing so well that, not only did we not make any reductions there, we need to continue to hire more.”

– Tim Westergreen, Founder