[grooveshark_hn]

Hey physcab, good to hear from you! We miss you, and we hope everything's going well.

We addressed some of your questions in the faq, especially different ways that artists can use Beluga: http://beluga.grooveshark.com/faq.html. Essentially we wanted to give artists a powerful - yet free - tool to let them understand their fan base.

As for data accuracy; although Beluga constantly surprises us with its insights, further investigation has always confirms those insights, at least as far as being solid statistics.

We toyed around with a lot of ways of displaying the data before coming to the final design. Oviously not everybody's going to know what a z-score is, but hopefully the interface is useful for those who don't and even more useful for those who do. We sprinkled helpful tooltips throughout the app to give some context to what's being displayed.

Thank you for your thoughtful feedback!