If you haven't heard about it yet:
They are a completely free music streaming service (they have a VIP subscription too for non-content based improvements or more features if you will).
They not only offer the features of recommendations, and 'personal radio' model of Pandora (replete with like and dislike) but also a searchable database like last.fm. And in fact the sheer size and diversity of their database puts them miles ahead of last.fm and other similar stations. The extent of its music library is truly mind boggling. They have tracks from the smallest artists in the most diverse places in the world ( for e.g: Pakistan) and a good deal of music from non-English artists too.
Now you must be wondering, how in this day and age of vicious content protection laws, is Grooveshark doing this? Isn't the fact that one of the biggest and best music libraries in existence is free counter-intuitive? Well, I do not know the legal aspects of Grooveshark and I'm sure they intrinsically lie in a gray area. Copyright infringement lawsuit have been filed against them but they have been dropped by the label EMI for a licensing deal with Grooveshark. But this is just one label , are the other labels gonna swoop on them soon? I honestly do not know.
All that I do know is that at the time of this post, they are up, online and awesome. So GO and use it all you want and lets hope it lasts!
Grooveshark are currently being sued by Universal.
ReplyDeletePsonar is another worth checking out though.
It's a free cloud-based solution which is focused on allowing users to do more with music that they own, unlike streaming services where you effectively 'rent' the music as long as you continue to subscribe (and hope that the music doesn't get pulled by the copyright owner.)
With Psonar you can upload the music you own to the cloud, so it's accessible everywhere, from any internet-connected device.
You can also search and listen to clips of any other track uploaded to the cloud and buy that music if you like.
Psonar also provides web-based iTunes-style management so that you can drag and drop tracks to any device that you can connect to a PC via USB. This means you can have your music on your device when that's best, but also in the cloud - so it's also great for backup:
http://blog.psonar.com/2010/02/26/laptop-dead-music-safe/
So - it's perfect if you love your old MP3 player, want to keep your music on an inexpensive memory stick or for when you don't have an internet connection and thus offers you the best of both worlds.