(Photo: Flickr)

Grooveshark CEO Sam Tarantino has a case of the Mondays, only this one's lasted every single day for over a year. Between 2011 and 2012, both Google and Apple pulled Grooveshark, a music streaming service, from their respective app stores. Then Spotify launched with star-studded support and millions in funding and Pandora, another Grooveshark competitor, successfully IPO'd. Oh, and this was all before the lawsuit. By the end of 2012, Universal Music Group had filed against Grooveshark and its employees for allegedly uploading copyrighted music.

Mr. Tarantino calls it the "year of getting punched in the face 10,000 times." Seems about right.

Since having to lay off a significant number of employees, the startup has relocated to a tiny office above a midtown dive bar and also operates another in Gainesville, Florida, which is not exactly known for its burgeoning tech scene. “I am literally broke," Mr. Tarantino told Mashable.

Now Mr. Tarantino is looking to reinvigorate the down and out streaming service with a new feature called "Broadcast." Launching today, Broadcast allows anyone to play DJ by putting together a tracklist of songs and recording interludes. Mashable notes that transitioning to more of a radio-type model could open the door for licensing deals with big music companies.

Meanwhile, Mr. Tarantino says he's looking to lower his rent, so give him a holler if you have a cheap spare bedroom.

(Photo: Blogspot)

Looks like hardware may finally be getting its chance in the sun at SXSW. [New York Times]

TechCrunch spoke to sources who were in the same fraternity with Reggie Brown and Evan Spiegel at Stanford and they corroborated the notion that Mr. Brown came up with the original idea for Snapchat. Winklevii'd. [TechCrunch]

Hey FYI, all those "free gift cards!" texts you were getting were actually spam (just in case you've never used a cell phone before). Luckily, the FTC is cracking down on 29 scam artists sending them out. [The Next Web]

Anita Sarkeesian, who became the target of trolls after daring to speak about women in video games, debuted her first episode of "Tropes vs. Women." [The Daily Dot]

Pandora's fourth quarter results were better than expected, but its CEO is still stepping down. [AllThingsD]

So much for a rosy outlook: Pandora stock plummeted 18 percent in trading after markets closed, as the digital music service projected increased losses for the current fiscal year.

Shares fell despite a strong fiscal third quarter for the company, in which revenue increased 60 percent to $120 million from the same period of 2011, and total listening hours grew by 67 percent.

Those numbers did little to distract investors from Pandora's dismal outlook for its current fiscal year, which runs through January, and for which the company is forecasting non-GAAP losses of 9 to 12 cents per share.

Based on a weighted average of 168 million shares, the per share projections in today's earnings release factors out to something between $15 to $20 million. When the company announced second quarter earnings in August, it projected losses at 4 to 8 cents per share.

On a conference call to discuss the earnings, Pandora executives said concern among advertisers over the effects of the looming fiscal cliff led the company to project a cold January for the company's bottom line.

Basically the artists probably got zero dollars from this.  (screengrab)

Earlier today, the Verge reported that Spotify, the music player that ratted you out to Facebook that one time you listened to Kenny G holiday hits, is rolling out a beta version of a browser-based web app. The feature was in high demand and should give the company a boost against competitors like Rdio.

At least one artist, however, has a few questions about how this whole streaming music business is supposed to work in the long run.

At Pitchfork, musician Damon Krukowski argues that while arecord companies have been famously quick to screw over their artists, these days the game has changed "from individualized swindles to systemic ones." In short, streaming services are in the business of paying very little for music. Here's what that looks like for the artists, using a few numbers from Mr. Krukowski's recent royalty check:

Galaxie 500's "Tugboat", for example, was played 7,800 times on Pandora that quarter, for which its three songwriters were paid a collective total of 21 cents, or seven cents each. Spotify pays better: For the 5,960 times "Tugboat" was played there, Galaxie 500's songwriters went collectively into triple digits: $1.05 (35 cents each).

That won't even buy a cup of deli coffee. And here we all felt like we were doing right by the artists by switching over from illegal downloading!

That's the status quo. And yet, Pandora is currently making a big push for reduced royalties. Just yesterday, more than a hundred musicians (from Jimmy Buffet to Ludacris) released an open letter that leads with good cop, insisting, "We are big fans of Pandora," but segueing into a complaint: “Why is the company asking Congress once again to step in and gut the royalties that thousands of musicians rely upon? That’s not fair and that’s now how partners work together."

But creative accounting isn't anything new. Mr. Krukowski's piece gets interesting when he asks why--given their dicey histories, profitability-wise--these companies are even in business at all. He takes a dim view:

The answer is capital, which is what Pandora and Spotify have and what they generate. These aren't record companies-- they don't make records, or anything else; apparently not even income. They exist to attract speculative capital. And for those who have a claim to ownership of that capital, they are earning millions-- in 2012, Pandora's executives sold $63 million of personal stock in the company.

It could be that once Spotify and Pandora finally achieve tech-company nirvana--better known as monetizable scale--suddenly their balance sheets will right themselves. But Mr. Krukowski's charge has the ring of truth, for all too many venture-backed startups. For all Facebook's talk about connection, the company's surest achievement seems to have been making the fortunes of everyone involved. He has a point. The only speculative equivalent for musicians is Kickstarter. And even then, many backers would rather bet big on iPhone accessories and mason jar cocktail shakers.

That wasn't all: Given the strong demand for Pandora and LinkedIn IPOs (and even stronger anticipation for the eventual Facebook offering), Spotify CEO Daniel Ek's timing for a U.S. launch seemed spot on.

Well, things have changed: Share prices for high profile tech IPOs such as Facebook, Zynga and Groupon have tanked, and as Spotify readies to close its latest round of fund-raising, the company looks likely to fall short of its goal. Instead of the $4 billion valuation that Spotify initially sought, the company will likely settle for something "slightly more than $3 billion," according to The Wall Street Journal.

But is the glass half empty, or half full? The Journal points out that for all the doom and gloom surrounding recent IPOs, tech companies are attracting high valuations:

AirBnb Inc., an online room rental site, is close to finalizing a new fundraising round expected to value the company at around $2.5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. Mobile payments company Square Inc. recently raised a new round of financing from investors including Starbucks Corp. that valued the company at $3.25 billion, other people familiar with the matter have said. Like Spotify, Square had been looking to raise as much as $4 billion, these people have said.

And even at $3 billion, Spotify is outpacing one model for large-scale digital subscription services, says Peter Kafka at All Things D:

That would be Netflix, which has some 27 million subscribers at around $8 a month. Today, after Carl Icahn goosed it a bit, Netflix has a market cap of $4.3 billion. Spotify says it has 4 million paying subscribers at around $10 a month.

So if Spotify missed its goal, its latest round of fundraising still looks bullish, and if you're looking for a reason why, you could do worse than to start with the conventional wisdom that investors have short memories.

Meanwhile, as the latest round of IPOs has shown, a lot can change in a year, and who knows what the market for tech stocks will look like if and when Spotify goes public. In light of that, it may be best to view Spotify's valuation in light of another bromide: Timing is everything.

Cheryl Mills (Photo: Wikipedia.org)

A lot of startups are letting their employees work from home for the next few days because of hurricane Sandy. That's all swell news, but those members of New York's tech scene who were supposed to go out and party or sit through conferences are screwed. Tech events are getting cancelled left and right, though some scene luminaries don't seem to mind.

AllThingsD's "D: Dive Into Mobile" conference has been postponed until a later date that will be announced as soon as possible. The event had originally been set for tomorrow and Tuesday in New York City. If you booked a room at the Ritz Carlton (looking at you, VC's), the hotel is apparently giving full refunds and waiving cancellation fees. Speakers like Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy and Hillary Clinton's Chief of Staff, Cheryl Mills, will just have to wait until another day to make their speeches.

The Big Apple Smackdown Tourney, a ping pong tournament held at Susan Sarandon's SPIN and co-sponsored by this very blog, was postponed until further notice. Gilt's Kevin Ryan will have to wait to face off in a heady match of pong against David Tisch and AllThingsD's Kara Swisher. Ping Pong'ing with the Tech Stars sounds like a Bravo reality show just waiting to happen. Maybe the rain delay will give Andy Cohen some time to hash out that concept. The event will be postponed "until a later date."

Facebook, however, is the company shedding the most tears about Sandy. They've had to cancel two of their New York events set for this week. The first is a Tuesday engineering open house that was planned for the social networking site’s New York HQ in midtown. And, more importantly, Facebook's Gifts event--set for Thursday at FAO Schwartz--has been nixed too. According to AllThingsD, Facebook was set to use the occasion to announce partnerships for its new platform that allows users to send gifts to each other in real life.

Monday's Google event in New York has also been shut down ahead of schedule. They were expected to present the Nexus 10 tablet and an updated version of Android OS. Guess you'll just have to use your old gear through the storm and dream of the bigger and better things that will come after the skies clear.

Mr. Mars

If you went to Hulu or NBC.com this morning to catch up on this weekend's Saturday Night Live--the highest-rated episode of the season--you could find Bruno Mars as a sad mouse mascot, Bruno Mars as a 17-year-old dropout in drag, Bruno Mars doing a monologue, and even Bruno Mars singing his own songs. The one clip you couldn't find is Bruno Mars playing a very versatile Pandora intern--one of the better-rated sketches from the evening.

"The very, very obvious culprit here are music licenses, which are almost always the culprit behind missing SNL sketches," reports AllThingsD. 

In the course of seven minutes, Mars belts out pieces of songs from Katy Perry, Green Day, Aerosmith and  Michael Jackson. And if the show doesn’t have the digital rights to a single piece of a single song, the whole thing goes black on the Web, legally speaking.

But NBC's loss is Dan Abrams gain, notes ATD. A video aggregator called GossipCop, which is part of the Mediaite empire, is hosting the video with an option to embed. We imagine NBC hasn't asked GossipCop to take it down yet because what  better way to communicate to the music industry that its policies aren't working than watching digital revenues get siphoned off by a legal analyst?

(Photo: Instagram/Ben Leventhal)

Bjorking Your Bachelor Party As a sign of just how many bachelor parties an up-and-coming venture bro is obligated to attend, during a recent PandoMonthly panel, Thrillist Ben Lerer said if he had to pick a totally ordinary superpower, it would be making sure his wife was cool with him going to bachelor parties. (To be fair, it took him a long time to come up with it, so it might not be that high on his list.) Hopefully his better half was understanding about a recent trip Mr. Lerer took to Iceland celebrate the end of singledom for Spark Capital's Mo Koyfman.

The recently promoted general partner invited a number of other techies for the festivities, including Eater.com cofounder Ben Leventhal and what looks an awful lot like Jakob Lodwick and Ricky Van Veen, who Mr. Koyfman would know from his days as an IAC executive "adult supervising" College Humor. Definitely present? Author and MSNBC cohost Touré! Mr. Koyfman tested hashtags for Instagramming his international excursion, trying out #koyfops before settling on #icemomo, although NYC yoga instructor Heather Lilleston also suggested #mochella.

Mr. Koyfman is engaged to Hilary Rosenman, CEO and founder at the shoe line Madison Harding. Ms. Rosenman is a graduate of the Upper East Side's prestigious Nightingale School, where she went with fellow fashion designer Charlotte Ronson. Her entrepreneurial exploits have been documented by no less than investor Joanne Wilson, better known as Gotham Gal.

Wait, when did this become the Vows section?

The New Rock Stars Bravo released an extended trailer for its upcoming, widely-panned new series Start-ups: Silicon Valley. In one scene, sibling stars Ben and Hermione Way are seen sitting at a conference table across from a slew of investors. Connie Loizos, a reporter for PEHub, confirmed their identities via Twitter: the two of the men in the scene are Noah Doyle and Jed Katz of Javelin Venture Partners. "just realizing the puzzled-looking investors in this clip are noah doyle and jed katz of javelin ventures," she tweeted. "poor guys."

(Screenshot: Bravo)

We can only hope that they weren't there to make friends.

Cultural Literacy Speaking of Startups: Silicon Valley, sounds like not every citizen of techlandia plans on boycotting and/or furiously protesting the controversial new show. Earlier this week, Google director of project management Hunter Walk confessed that he's "Been invited to 2x more viewing parties for Bravo's Silicon Valley show than for presidential debates." Dire portent of America's decline, or revealing statement regarding startup self-involvement?

Only the wild-eyed witches of the Real Housewives franchise are qualified to answer, and they're not talking.

xoxo, Gossip Girl Since we still haven't found the time to download Spotify onto our work computer, we've been saddled with that old music standby: Pandora. This week we noticed that the typical background, which is usually dark blue with lighter blue bubbles, was replaced by a large photo of Pandora founder Tim Westergren. "Hmm, he looks familiar," we thought. "Where have we seen him before?"

(Photo: Pandora)

Turns out we had seen him in the deliciously trashy teen drama Gossip Girl--well, kind of. Mr. Westergren looks remarkably similar to Rufus Humphrey, father to Jenny and Dan Humphrey and portrayed by Matthew Settle on the scandalous show.

(Photo: NYMag)

The last time we spotted Mr. Settle in Startupland was with Brew PR cofounder Brooke Hammerling at the Gizmodo "First Comes the Dream" event.

If that whole Pandora thing doesn't quite pan out, we suppose Mr. Westergren can always play a Rufus Humphrey stand-in.

Mayor of Mindshare: How ubiquitous is Foursquare? What happens in the hinterlands is anyone's guess, but the company certainly seems to have New York City on lock. The latest evidence is this snapshot, recently tweeted by Google trendspotter Caroline McCarthy:

Been there!

As Ms. McCarthy points out, context is implicitly assumed to be unnecessary. And we must say, as insider-y local advertising goes, it's far more charming than the tired, am-I-right politicking of Manhattan Mini Storage.

@Emrboidery  How seriously do you take the consistency of your social media branding? Probably not as seriously as Sincerely community manager and noted Instagrammer Doctor Popular. As revealed by this dispatch from Laughing Squid ringleader Scott Beale, the good doctor has his twitter handle--@docpop--embroidered on the inside of his suit jacket:

Sporty!

Hey, there are probably worse ways to get an abandoned item of clothing back.

As always: Overheard a juicy tidbit about impending departures or imminent acquisitions? Dying to dish about startup blunders or frothy financing? Holler at your girls: tips@betabeat.com

Well, the trend appears to have reached ludicrous new heights. Spotted today, by romance book blogger Sarah Wendell:

Get your freak on. (Photo: twitter.com/SmartBitches)

That's right: Bach's Cantata No. 147 is now endorsed by 50 Shades of Grey author E.L. James. What, you just assumed sex dungeons all played heavy metal? Shame on you for your stereotyping.

Ms. Wendell added, "I will say this, I find the performance of this piece sloppy and melodramatic. Perhaps that is fitting." Perhaps!

All this can be yours. (Photo: Loosecubes)

Thanks to Loosecubes, you can now work in a cutely outfitting shipping container, in Downtown Brooklyn. [Curbed]

Apple loves Daring Fireball. [Businessweek]

Mr. Ohanian goes to Washington, talks about "awesomeness." [Washington Post]

Apple has no intention of ceding any musical ground to Internet radio, and so the company is apparently building a Pandora challenger. [New York Times]

Turns out Kansas City was very helpful with the process of building Google Fiber. [Ars Technica]