This free web application I discovered via a ReadWriteWeb digest on streaming music apps allows you to listen to any song on demand. There are no audio ads interjected and the only ad displayed at all is an unobtrusive skyscraper on the right. The sound quality is excellent and the interface is a treat. It’s like a free Rhapsody service with a UI that doesn’t suck.
The Good
Couple this app (a “music vetting” tool) with other discovery-focused apps like Last.fm and Pandora and you have an easy way to find and test new music. The 30sec samples you get from iTunes just aren’t enough to decide whether you want to buy an album. I’ve found that I typically need to live with the songs for a few days for them to grow on me. With Grooveshark you can listen to an entire album on demand and and then share a URL that instantly plays an album or specific track. They’ve made it so the service doesn’t require any registration to use and works within a couple seconds of the first page load. The advantages of registering appear to be the ability to save playlists, love tracks and sync recommendations with networks like Facebook and StumbleUpon. So far I’ve been using it without registration and it delivers exactly what I want.
What needs fixing
I only have two minor gripes about the app so far:
1. Duplicates: As well done as the interface is they should add a little bit of intelligence to the queueing so it removes duplicate tracks. For some reason there seems to be quite a few duplicates even within the same album sometimes. I would think they could default it to recognize when the name of the track is identical and have it weed out the duplicates.
2. Auto track ordering: The tracks on an album are intended to be listened to in a certain order however Grooveshark jumbles the ordering for some reason. It would seem trivial to hit an external service like Amazon or iTunes to order the tracks properly so clicking the play button on the album yields the same experience as playing the tracks sequentially in iTunes.
Both of these issues are miniscule in relation to how good (and free) the service is and both can be corrected by manually tinkering with the playlist once it’s created. But these two tiny improvements would make the service flawless IMHO.
My concern
So at this point my only real concern is: “how can they possibly be making enough money to sustain it?” This is a service for which I would happily pay $5-10/mo. They have to be paying the ASCAP royalties on every song they stream. Given that there are no audio interruptions and that I typically listen to it with the interface minimized anyways (plus when I AM looking at it, the ad displayed is so unobtrusive I don’t notice it) I wonder how they can be covering the bandwidth charges and streaming royalties. It would be a shame to see this disappear. Kudos to them if they have a different model in mind and are just grabbing eardrums right now. Their Compete traffic graph certainly indicates that they’re doing something right. I just hope the service doesn’t go away as I’ve vowed to never give Rhapsody another dime and this is currently filling that void.
What music discovery and vetting apps do you use?
I love that site! I’ve been using grooveshark since the start of this year, and they’re great! Unfortunately, they’ve been plagued with bandwidth issues, as oftentimes my songs don’t play immediately, or starts buffering in the middle of a song. Otherwise, their song selection is extensive than others, and I love looking at other people’s playlists. Also, there’s the autoplay feature which I love!
Nice find. Been listening to it for the last hour or two, seeing what they have and how well they categorize things.
Interesting range of bands. In the postrock realm, they have Epic 45 and The Berg Sans Nipple, but not Motoro Famm. I can accept that. :) However, looking at what’s lumped in the postrock genre and album/song lists, they’ve failed big time. (“Postrock” is my music tool test suite of sorts to see how well something scores on the “quirky ill-defined modern” scale. )
On the other hand, after selecting many Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry tracks, the auto-play thing made some reasonable David Bowie additions. Doesn’t seem as clever as Pandora, though.
I checked out some Zeppelin, and they seem to have pretty much every album, including what I thought were bootlegs.
Likewise for Kraftwerk; some live stuff I’m quite sure has not been officially released.
Not every song from every album, but still good. I’m having fun thinking of stuff I’ve not heard in a while and may not have handy someplace.
One UI annoyance I ran into: it’s really easy to hit the Play button on an artist’s name, and end up with EVERY song in your queue. Clearing all those new additions is tedious; needs a confirmation for such bulk additions, or
an undo button.
By the way, the sound quality is great.
Yes, this is a great service and most importantly for free but, still, users can have legal problems:
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_grooveshark.com_legal
Angelika,
I read that article and maybe I’m missing something but I’m using Grooveshark to LISTEN to music not to SELL it. The horror stories in the article seem to refer to some other aspect of the service whereby users are reselling the artists’ music. Perhaps there’s a feature whereby a listener can put a widget on his/her blog and somehow take commission if people purchase the music via that? Not sure but I fail to see how this has any implications for people listening to songs via the Grooveshark player…
sean
Angelika,
I read that article and maybe I'm missing something but I'm using Grooveshark to LISTEN to music not to SELL it. The horror stories in the article seem to refer to some other aspect of the service whereby users are reselling the artists' music. Perhaps there's a feature whereby a listener can put a widget on his/her blog and somehow take commission if people purchase the music via that? Not sure but I fail to see how this has any implications for people listening to songs via the Grooveshark player…
sean
thank you for this great tip. do you know mucelli.com? it’s also a great service.
Yeah, it is a great music service! Especially they offer very rare and non-commercial music, thats great! Another good service is deezer.com, a music on demand service!
Thank you really much for this new appliaction. I want to ask a question to you. Do you know any application that is able to identify a played song and shows me its name and lyrics?
yeah, Shazam for the iPhone is probably the most popular one. It works surprisingly well. I've seen another one called SoundHound on the iPhone but have not yet used it. Supposedly you can hum a song and it will somehow offer suggestions based on matching a fingerprint of tonal changes (which is amazing if it works).
Here are the links for those:
http://www.shazam.com/
http://www.sound-hound.com/