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Comment by rscott | Hacker News Reader

I'm a huge Pandora fan as well. For some reason one day I decided to quickly profess my love for them via email and actually got a response asking if I wanted a shirt or hat. This blew my mind, and I rock my Pandora baseball tee often as a result.

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What's your shirt size? We'll send you a t-shirt (or a few!) if you're willing to try our service. And actually, I'll extend this offer to any HN reader/user.

Chris from Grooveshark.

dibs. I'm a large.

Huge fan of your service, great way to get a hold of obscure music fast. Haven't built out my playlists yet though

Finally tracked down a song I've been looking for since I stopped using my old creative zen player: http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/song/Sasha_s_Voyage_Of_Ima/1...

We do have quite a bit of obscure music. For sharing songs, you might want to check out our URL shortener, TinySong.com (we have other sharing features on the songs themselves in the Info pane). You can also utilize our API if you'd like to do cool stuff with our library.

Hey Chris, I'm a huge fan of Grooveshark, and it's cool to see you guys on HN.

I do have one suggestion for you though: autoplay is a great feature, but it took me a long time to realize the button was even there. If there's a way to make it more prominent I think that would help.

Hey, we're all huge fans of HN. Great community.

Thanks for your suggestion about Autoplay. This will be fixed in our upcoming product launch. If you want a sneak peak, check out preview.grooveshark.com.

Grooveshark's awesome! Hopefully I can come visit you guys the next time I'm back in Gainesville.

Thanks! Visit anytime. We're right next to the Hippodrome on the 2nd floor above Dragonfly. If you walk out on the ledge until you hear Skyler pounding on his 1980's style IBM keyboard, you've found Grooveshark.

Checked it out after reading this post, and I'm damn impressed. It seems to have everything I can think of, and the quality's sweet. One question, though: I'm located in Canadian, and lots of streaming services including Pandora and others I was interested in using either didn't offer service outside of the states or stopped offering it once they hit a certain size. Is that going to be the case with your service as well? If not, I'm probably hooked.

Thanks.

PS: If you'd be willing to toss a shirt up north of the border, I'm a medium.

We fully intend on offering a worldwide service. There are many factors involved of course with providing that type of coverage (some technical, some legal). But know that we are keeping our international users in mind as we negotiate contracts and develop our products.

I'll be happy to toss up a shirt up North (my e-mail is in my profile). We get them made by American Apparel and they are quite comfy. I've been wearing mine all week and I think my co-workers are starting to demand a change.

Grooveshark looks nice! Pandora's been recycling the same songs too much for my tastes lately, and I'm getting bored with it. I also wish I could easily access the "station logs" later.

I like the fair use policy on the copyrights page a lot.

Are you really going to be able to let users drive to the exact song they want to hear, even after critical mass builds up? Seems too good to be true. I always assumed that was how Pandora managed to keep the heat off (by not letting users pick the exact song when they want to hear it).

Thanks! Our new version is even nicer :) You can go to preview.grooveshark.com to check it out.

To answer your question, yes, we will always have a search-and-discover interface because that is where our real value comes from.

As far as critical mass is concerned, we are doubling about every 2-3 months with absolutely no marketing or PR (which is why you don't hear about us on TechCrunch very often). We've got a lot of work ahead of us in terms of scaling to meet demand, but so far we're handling it well.

I signed up for Grooveshark a while back, but I've really been trying it today and I'm loving it.

Bonus points for having a song that my $15/mo subscription service doesn't!

Awesome! Thats the plan. E-mail me if you'd like a shirt. :)

I had a similar experience. I was working thanksgiving evening and sent them an e-mail complimenting their unique advertisements (weird, I know - I'm graphic artist though, so I really appreciate the creativity that goes into most of their ads). I got an e-mail back a few minutes later, from the cfo. I was blown away, and actually felt kinda bad for e-mailing on a holiday!

I never expected a response at all, let alone that night.

I got a hat. I treasure that hat like it were my first born.

Its amazing how much more highly I think of them for basically just throwing out hats.

You have stumbled onto my all-encompassing Theory of Service: people love getting comped. No matter how cheap or silly, if it came for free people will remember you fondly for it and give you their business in the future. And they will probably blog and post on HN about it too :)

If I ever open a restaurant I am going to randomly dispense free appetizers and desserts. If I ever run a (freemium) startup, I am going to randomly give away free accounts. Not to everyone, not so much that it hurts the bottom line, but enough that the buzz and goodwill generated outweighs whatever loss I'm taking.

There is definitely a limit there. No matter how cheap or silly, as long as it doesn't seem cheap, if it came for free people will remember. The times I have been given something free that is particularly cheaply made, usually something made out of very low quality plastic, I always think "Oh, these guys evidently don't care about their users/fans/supporters, if they're going to give me something that won't last 10 minutes".

I think its important to give away things that are not your core business. I like the pandora hat and I remember it fondly, but if my coworker got a super-awesome pandora account, I think I would just feel "dang, why didn't I get one".

I never used Pandora that much—I prefer consciously sitting down and listening to a particular album—but when I threw an early morning party, I set Pandora to play light jazz and the music gave everything a great feel. It's awesome that nowadays tools exist to let us manage music that way.

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