I am very much a novice to the world of free internet music radio. I generally just listen to my iPod and CD collection. With Pandora users continuing to overwhelm me at our Fusework Studios office, I finally decided to check out my online music options. This ultimately created a Twitter brand experience for me that I wanted to share. It’s funny how everything ties together.
Pandora is part of The Music Genome Project and I have included an excerpt from their site which pretty much sums up the mission statment:
Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song – everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records – it’s about what each individual song sounds like.
Overall, I like Pandora’s ability to create a playlist of songs that I like by identifying similar qualities within each song. I am not crazy, however, about the ability to browse through songs - it seems somewhat limited.
Following a post on Facebook about Pandora, I was turned on to Grooveshark by a friend. I decided to check it out for a few days to compare. After listening for a few days I tweeted asking my followers if they had a preference between Grooveshark and Pandora. @Grooveshark quickly responded by following me on Twitter and replying with a very unbiased opinion that Grooveshark was indeed better:). Still being relatively new to both Pandora and Grooveshark I asked the @Grooveshark Twitter user to explain why. I have included a screen shot of the replies in this post.
Overall, this interaction was very impressive and is a perfect example on how a brand can use Twitter as a powerful tool. Here is how it went 
down:
- Grooveshark found me on Twitter
- Grooveshark sent me a Tweet using a bit of humor to show some personality
- Grooveshark went on to answer my question about what separates them from Pandora
- I was then able to retweet their answer to help in increasing brand awareness and also told everyone at the office about it
- Grooveshark also offered personal assistance with any of my questions/suggestions – very cool.
I am still undecided on which service is better, but Grooveshark has definitely created a better brand experience for me thus far. The ability Twitter has given a brand to directly connect with their end user is amazing.
[...] Original post by derekmcclain [...]
[...] few hours later (just now) i found that our talk had inspired connection in derek, and posted about it in his blog. “it’s funny how everything ties together”–a secret bridge message. the photo i [...]
Derek, my main experience is with Pandora; they’ve turned me on to some great music. I have friends who use Last.fm, but I haven’t listened to more than a song or two with them. I think they also allow more user control, similar to Grooveshark. The best part of this example is that Grooveshark didn’t simply follow you because you tweeted about them, they actually engaged you in conversation. I definitely could do this better myself!
I appreciate you taking the time to link back to my blog. Thanks again for your help on Twitter.
Michael,
I appreciate you blog comment. Yes, the interaction was huge. A lot of brands have started following me recently, but not many of them actually take the time to make a connection with their end user via Twitter. It is amazing what one simple message can do in terms of increasing customer loyalty.