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GroovesharkGrooveshark
is the most exciting web-app I’ve come across in a long time. I discovered it a long time back at the suggestion of a friend, who compared it to
PandoraPandora. Pandora – which has been around for five years – asks you to tell it songs and musical artists you like, and then plays music it thinks you might like as well by comparing the information you gave it to
The Music Genome Project.
Grooveshark is really a completely different type of musical product. The reason it was compared by my friend is that it has a feature – a small button in the bottom right hand corner labeled ‘radio’ – that similarly tries to automatically generate music for you to listen to based on music you’ve already called up.
Thinking ‘Out of The (Pandora’s) Box’
Grooveshark is essentially a web-based audio-focused media player, with a library of music that is comprised of .mp3′s uploaded by Grooveshark’s userbase. In effect, grooveshark has almost every song you can think of, whether popular, obscure, new, or old. Each song is offered for sale by linking to the song on Amazon MP3 and/or iTunes.
In Grooveshark, you can upload your library of music, and then build upon it, collecting music from Grooveshark’s database. This library is kept for you in your User Account, and you can access if from any internet capable computer (as well as a desktop, and Android App) You can collect the best songs in a separate area of the website by adding the songs to your
Favoritesfavorites, and create playlists.
Artists
Grooveshark REALLY got exciting when they unleashed ‘
Grooveshark Artists‘ with this new product, Grooveshark now provided an opportunity for Musical Artists to authentically upload their music to the web-app, then track it as it made its way over the internet and to the ears of their audience, as well as an opportunity to interact and communicate with people as they listen to their music.
What Grooveshark had created was a new-easy-and FREE way to publish your music, and make it available to any of the hundreds of thousands of people who have signed up to the service.
Radio
The Radio button – which I mentioned earlier – is a handy little feature. Whenever this button is clicked on, Grooveshark will automatically start to add similar songs to your queue based on what you already have there. This way, you can put together a small assortment of the kind of music you wish to listen to, then click the radio button, and let Grooveshark do the rest as you listen to and discover music for the next hour or more.
This feature is comparable to that of Pandora Radio – but if I am completely honest, Grooveshark – in this respect – falls short of its competition. In my early days of using the service, I constantly found that no matter what my musical selection beforehand, after a long enough period of time I was constantly presented with a smattering of Boy Bands akin to
Green Day.
Very Important Person
Grooveshark is a free service – though it does offer a
‘VIP’ version of the service that can be assessed for a year for $30 or a Month for $3. Once you’re a VIP a few things happen.
Grooveshark’s entire library is available to any person who wishes to use their service, and logged in users can create a library, so they can seperate ‘their’ music from all the rest, and not have to search for music every time they want to listen to it. They can also add songs to their ‘favorites’ to keep a list of just the best. Grooveshark VIPs can keep 10 times as many songs in their libraries and favorites lists. That’s 5,000 Favorites to a regular user’s 500 and 50,000 in the library to a regular user’s 5,000.
As a Grooveshark VIP, a user has access to the desktop application, and the mobile application. The desktop application lets you use grooveshark without needing to keep your browser open, and the mobile application can be installed on Andriod and Blackberry phones (some exceptions) and brings all the features of Grooveshark to your palm. Grooveshark also recently released an iPhone application, but this application is only available to those with a jail-broken iPhone.
Whenever Grooveshark is working on a feature VIP users get to use it first. My favorite VIP feature is a button that lets you pick a genre of music to listen to, and Grooveshark Radio will play music that falls into that genre.
Grooveshark’s Themes also open up to a VIP user. Where as unpaid users have a selection of three or four themes, VIP users have free reign over the entire selection.
When Grooveshark is used as a free service, the right hand side of your screen is taken up by rotating banner ads. As a VIP member, these ads are no more.
Need clarification? Have a Question? Log in with FacebookFacebook or Twitter and comment below. Tell me what YOU think of Grooveshark, or if you use something else, something better?
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Written and Published by JyoNah (Jonah Price)
