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.^[1] 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.

Related articles

• Grooveshark – Grooveshark (itunes.apple.com)
• Is Grooveshark Misleading Users? (thecontrapuntist.com)
• Geek Review: Grooveshark streaming music for BlackBerry (bbgeeks.com)
• Grooveshark for Android Updated, iPhone App Back on Cydia (intomobile.com)

1. ^[1] Napster 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. ↩

That said, Napster still has a lot to offer. First off, they offer full-length audio streaming of just about their entire music library. Just go to free.napster.com. Sure is, you can only listen to a song three times for free – then you either have to buy it or stop listening. But hey, how many songs do you really want to hear more than three times? And if it is worth listening to more than three times, isn’t it worth $.99?

Napster recently came out with a really impressive deal that I’d jump on if I was an audiophile…but I’m not. Its a $5/mo. package which gets you full streaming access to Napster’s massive (7 million+ songs) library and five permanent MP3 downloads. Snikes. Apple’s iTunes will charge you the $5 for the five songs, forget about being able to stream unlimited songs all month long!

So, what am I saying? Take a look at Napster. They are trying so hard – and in my opinion, while the hype is no longer on their side they are doing a great and innovative job of offering music to the masses at reasonable prices.