Grooveshark (Music).

[Grooveshark has since become defunct.]

For a while I was a big fan of Pandora. Pandora is still a great way to listen to and find new music – but with ads becoming more frequent and its inability to tell that I prefer certain lyrical genres, I eventually became disillusioned.

I was a big fan of Napster – but I finally canceled them this past month.¹Napster let me down on several fronts. First, their site has been horrendously buggy. Sometimes music wouldn’t play, sometimes favorites wouldn’t save, and on and on. Secondly, they raised the price. If everything had worked well this might not have been a big deal, but they raised the price while their site still didn’t work all that great. Over the past several months I’ve been experimenting with Grooveshark and have been quite impressed. What makes Grooveshark so amazing?

1. It is free and legal.
2. It has a humongous library of music.
3. The site works well – you can save, favorite, and share songs.
4. Their premium service is only $3/mo.
5. With the premium service you can utilize their Grooveshark mobile phone apps for music on the go.

That said, I do have a few minor issues with Grooveshark:

1. They allow people to upload their own music – so sometimes you end up with multiple copies of the same track – and of varying qualities and with differing levels of correct titling.
2. Sometimes the songs stop working. They released a fix for this perhaps a week or two ago and it has greatly reduced the problem, but it still occurs on occasion.
3. Its integration with last.fm leaves a bit to be desired. Specifically, it’d be nice to get a Pandora-esque feel directly through the Grooveshark interface.

All that said, I’m still extremely happy with the service. If you are looking for a good music service – Grooveshark is it. Currently the price is only $3/mo. for premium – but the price is going up soon, so I’d just on the bandwagon now.