Personalized song site GreetBeatz offers virtual gifts I’d actually pay for

Virtual goods may be big business, as demonstrated recently by Chinese game maker ChangYou’s IPO, but they’re still not something I personally would spend much money on, or be terribly excited about receiving as gifts. At least, that was the case until I saw a site called GreetBeatz, which offers a fun twist on the virtual gift by allowing people to buy customized hip hop songs for their friends. (If the music industry’s revenues continue to shrink, this could be one of the few reliable ways for rappers to make money.)

The obvious formula here is to take existing songs and plug in a few words, like the recipient’s name. On GreetBeatz, however, rappers write the songs from scratch. Take, for example, this song purchased for VentureBeat writer Eric Eldon’s birthday. Sometime-VentureBeat writer Doug Sherrets just provided some details about Eric, and now Eric has a song that’s all about him and VentureBeat, which also provides an overview of what GreetBeatz does. Even better is another song listed in the “songs you might like section,” written for PayPal and Slide co-founder Max Levchin, which has the meta bonus of referencing virtual goods.

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So would someone pay for this? Well, I would — these aren’t songs that I want to listen to over and over (to put it politely), but they make me laugh, and they’re really personal, in a way that even a customized funny ecard isn’t. Ashvin Kumar, who developed the site with his friend Chris Estreich, says there’s been plenty of repeat business too. Right now songs cost about $20, although the pair is still experimenting with pricing. (The rapper takes a healthy cut of that payment — writing birthday jingles may not quite jibe with an MC’s dream of superstardom, but hey, money is money.) And since the song is posted on the recipient’s Facebook Wall, your other friends see it, and may want to try the site out too.

The real question is whether this kind of highly personalized service can become a mass business. Right now, there are only a few musicians on the site (musicians of Kumar and Estreich’s choosing), but Kumar says that if the site is the hit, the long-term plan is to turn it into more of an open marketplace, where customers can connect with musicians who want to make some cash — to become essentially the Etsy of personalized songs.

“Building a marketplace is a solved problem,” he says.

Kumar is also offering a discount for VentureBeat readers: The first 10 readers who enter the code VENTUREBEAT4LIFE (no, I didn’t come up with it) will get a $5 discount.