GrooveShark - a free alternative to Last.fm!

It is strange that so far this service has gone unnoticed in Habré: in fact, many here have listened (or continue to listen) to Last.fm. But GrooveShark is an excellent web service, not inferior to it at all! In addition, it is enough to have only a browser with flash, and you can listen to your favorite music, upload your tracks, share playlists and much more!




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The GrooveShark interface is completely Flash based and strongly resembles iTunes: on the left, playlists, favorites, friends, and search. The center from the search form mutates into the current playlist or track list :) Everything is simple and intuitive.

Navigation is nicely done: you can use the browser's ← / → buttons without rebooting: a flash movie inserts, for example, "# / search / people / ootync" into the address bar :)

The content of the site pleases: no garbage in the tags, everything is clean and neat: the names, artists, albums, covers. The collection even has a certain number of Russian songs and there you can easily find Pugachev :) Superficial verification also showed that the resource does not bypass any of the famous musical genres: from country to gothic EBM.

The “sociality” of the player is also high: each track can be marked with a heart, or you can put a smiley on it. If you are not too lazy to evaluate the tracks, clicking on the “RADIO” button will tell you what to listen to, and - subjectively - works much more pleasantly than the similar recommendations on Last.fm :) Of course, you can follow individuals with similar tastes.

Against the background of the foolish copyright clashes that have been constantly appearing lately, the question immediately pops up: is the service legal? Do not close? No :) Grooveshark.com has an agreement with EMI, one of the biggest music copyright holders. The general meaning of the press release of October 13 is as follows: EMI Music and EMI Music Publishing provide site users with access to the content of these labels for free online. Also on the site it is said that Grooveshark.com is obliged to compensate the copyright holder for each track heard on its pages.

You can upload your tracks in MP3 format to the service: in the search results, preference is given to the maximum bit rate and sampling. You can share the track with friends :)

Of course, the owners do not suffer from an attack of charity and there are a number of features available only to VIP account owners for $ 3 per month: the disappearance of the banner, which occupies a decent part of the screen on the right and some visual sugar. Practice has shown that free mode does not bring any significant inconvenience :)

Enjoy gentlemen! :)

UPD: Two tasty features are noticed : ChromeShark plugin for Google Chrome, which allows you to listen to music and browse tracks without switching the browser tabs; and an iPhone application that has already been sent to the AppStore. We wait! :)

UPD2 : Iboong discovered the plugin grooveshark-ad-remover to chrome to kill ads.