Cool Site of the Week: Grooveshark

If you haven’t heard of Grooveshark yet, then your life is about to get a whole lot happier, especially if you spend a lot of time on the computer and like music.  Grooveshark is an internationally available on-demand music streaming service.  Translated into plain English: Grooveshark lets you listen to whatever music you want, whenever, online and for free.


To use Grooveshark in its most basic form, you just head over to the website, search for the song you want and hey presto, you listen to your requested song.  If you want to get a little more advanced, you can sign-up for a free account, which lets you favourite songs and create play lists.  If you want to get really, really, really advanced, you can pay for a VIP account, which is supposed to let you into a realm of exclusiveness.  What that exclusiveness includes isn’t really that clear (a VIP badge next to your name, the ability to run the programme from a desktop programme rather than just from your browser), so I haven’t been persuaded to part with my cash just yet, especially as everything I seem to need is available in the free version.


Some of you might be having flashbacks to the whole Pandora frenzy and for you non-US residents that may be a bit painful since Pandora slammed the door in our face and on our fingers (ouch!).  I did try and ask the secret Grooveshark people if a similar situation would happen with their service and also what would happen to any cash we might have paid but they haven’t responded.  However, there are quite a lot of differences between the two services (and some similarities), here are some of the exciting points about Grooveshark:

• You can listen to the same song over and over and over and over (something I like to do)
• You choose exactly what you want to listen to, none of this weird pick a song and get 100 like it before you even hear the song you wanted to hear in the first place
• Playlists – yep, you can make them
• Radio – Grooveshark does have a radio station type feature.  To be honest I haven’t tried it much because it never seems to be playing what I am interested in and I can’t find a way to adjust it (maybe that’s a VIP feature?) but it has one!
• Popular – one of my favourite bits – when you click on this handy little button you can see what other Grooveshark listeners have been listening to all that week or all that day.  Makes finding all the cool new hits very easy.
• Wide range of music – so far there has only been one song that I have searched for that wasn’t in the database and I imagine it will show up soon.  Grooveshark found lots of Dutch artists as well.

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