Question: how relevant is this? How many people start looking for a service for streaming music, without having been prompted by a blog or a comment from someone else?
Google search results define our world. To anyone, looking for anything, the first 3-4 options in a Google Search are the only sites that exist online. We all know about the latest and coolest music sites and services. The average person doesn’t. If a friend doesn’t tell them about Tubeify and they don’t read tech blogs, they’ll never hear about it. Save for a stray alert on Facebook or Twitter, most people won’t hear about these sites unless they’re searching for them on Google. Yes, they might Bing it too, but I refuse to accept that verb.
After a short experiment, the results were rather revealing. Whenever I searched for “music streaming”, “free music”, “listen to music online”,”listen to music”, and even just the term “listen”, the results were almost identical. In these search results, Grooveshark rose to the top of the list. Every single time. Except one.