Grooveshark is amazing. They have the best library out there hands down. Yes, they got it through piracy yadda yadda but they have more music than any of the legit services out there (I pay $9.99 for rdio per month..).
The thing is that I can find label music on Grooveshark (iTunes top 500 sort of stuff) but I can also easily find the most obscure stuff you can think of. So fan remixes, and regional music (Indian music, Pakistani music, Lebanese music, etc. etc.). The other services out there have a LONG way to go to make that happen.
Grooveshark has great breadth, but lacks in depth. There are lots of types of music, but I find that they rarely have the specific artists that I'm looking for. (I mainly listen to power metal.)
Also, there are a lot of tracks that finish prematurely, are just static, or simply don't play. I've tried flagging them as broken, but Grooveshark keeps adding them to my playlists. There are also tons of tagging issues (ie: there's one album under "Battle Beast" and another under "BATTLE BEAST" for the same band), making it difficult to find things sometimes.
I agree, Grooveshark is the best one out there, but it's far from perfect.
YouTube is still the king of Internet music. I can find full length new releases of relatively unknown music on YouTube that I can't find anywhere else. The downsides of YouTube are quality control, and that as a playlist application it kind of sucks (compared to GrooveShark).
I love Grooveshark but disagree that it's any good for finding obscure music. For instance, Rare Essence is the most popular Go Go (a DC genre) band of all time excluding Chuck Brown and his band (the Soul Searchers), Brown having created Go Go. If you aren't from DC then this probably sounds like nonsense, but you really can't underestimate how big these bands are in the city, along with Junkyard Band, Backyard Band, and the Northeast Groovers.
For Chuck Brown, I see 21 songs. I have double albums of his with more songs than that. For Rare Essence, there are 17 songs, including a couple duplicates and a misattribution ("One Leg Up" is by Pure Elegance). BYB has 11 songs, NEG has 6, Junkyard has only one (!). These are very prolific bands that have produced tons of records sold in the DC area.
The thing is, nobody ever really "pirated" Go Go music, that is, put it on the internet. Just lots of bootleg cassettes and CDs.
I find Grooveshark to be limited to fairly mainstream and popular music, the kind that at one time or another could be found in record stores across the US/Europe or at least over a very large region within those places.
I'm the developer of the project and I just hijacked the top comment! :)
It's been a 2 years long ride. I used Backbone and Zepto on front end, jake for building and managing assets. App uses the same PHP backend as a desktop site.
You could argue the same about Youtube, in some sense.
They do pay royalties to some artists, and at least for a while a lot of upcoming artists were advertising their new albums there. I discovered a bunch of great groups through that.
Unrelated with revenue, but I liked how some artists (Avicii comes to mind) ask you what do you think about X song when you play it in Grooveshark, that's some valuable direct feedback. The radios are awesome too.
Can't hide the fact I've been using it for years, but I truly think Grooveshark is the best music streaming service by far. Spotify's catalog is nowhere as large, Pandora misses on so many features, Last.fm recommendations are good but what else do they do...
>Essentially it's a streaming frontend for illegaly uploaded music.
And I think it's only a good thing. 'Legal/Illegal' are just man-made barriers to access the spirit of freedom to rejoice/discover various cultures/tradition/communities.
I understand that there is a possible monetary loss involved as a side-effect, but I don't think it's much serious as the various Copyright organisations project it to us[1]. If that was how it was, the internet would be piracy free, already.
I use Grooveshark daily. Aside from the excellent UI and service (couldn't tell you the last time it was down), the catalog is incredible.
One thing to note, though, is that they do pretty well with takedowns. For example, I attempted to upload a copyrighted song years ago and uploads were disabled on my account. They also work with publishers and artists to ensure fair compensation is made.
I've paid for the Pro account for a few years now and strongly believe they could do better than their competition if they made the service paid-only.
This is live for ages. I think they just started PR around this because it can now not die on iOS 7, running in background.
As a side note, try out Leap Motion playback controls on GS (in Settings > Subscription, wtf), they're super sweet. I just wave my hands around to control music, it's awesome!
they must've optimized it some more since I've last tried. it runs very snappily on the Nexus 4, as fast as a native app for the most part, and that hasn't been the case last time I tried it. well done.
Yeah. I don't use the HTML5 player much because it doesn't support broadcasts, which are the main feature I rely on, and it seems to be a bit unreliable on Android in general - it's still neat thoug.
Side note: my favorite radio show is uploaded to Grooveshark and the other day I needed to listen it offline, so I just used a proxy (fiddler) and save the stream from the proxy session console. There is an API where you can do the same, I think, because is just one request with the location of the MP3 audio. There are a lot of apps for downloading mp3 from Grooveshark but they usually came with a lot of crapware.
Grooveshark is good 'more so' for playing the music you have already discovered. I personally like 8 Tracks model, Its one of the best platform to discover new music.
It doesnt encourage piracy and at the same time lets us get some good free music. Its spot on solution.
It also takes care of piracy really well. Its a radio, so there are limitation on you going back and front, at the same time you can listen to the playlist as many times as you want.
User upload their own music: Which means no piracy: You have your paid content you are just broadcasting to larger audience. Like having your own radio station.
Odd. In Midori and Chromium, seems to work correctly. In Firefox, it appears crippled and I get 38 errors on the console -- SyntaxError, TypeError, ReferenceError -- including:
The HTML5 player has been standard for at least a year now for GS. The two primary reasons I've avoided it are:
- Lack of broadcasts. (Presumably available in their native app.)
- Lack of wired.com-esque topnav position fixing in Chrome mobile. It's a minor thing, but having the entire page shift down every time you scroll can lead to incorrect menu selections when mindlessly selecting music.
I would use this all the time but there's one problem: the song doesn't advance to the next one on my iphone unless Safari is open. So, my phone has to be on with the screen on or the music ends when a song ends. (Grooveshark has had this player for a while... I haven't tried it in iOS 7).
We're currently working on a solution for this. The problem is that Safari stops running javascript and allowing us to stream audio after the phone has been off for some time.
Seconded. Love using Grooveshark to choose specific music I'm in the mood for (versus Pandora, for when I just want music to play non stop without having to think about choosing something), but Grooveshark only works for a few songs before it falls asleep and you have to tend to it.
Grooveshark has been my favorite online music player for last 3 years, but recently I have observed a lot of bugs on their site, which hinders smoooth experience and forces me to consider alternatives.
Used to love Grooveshark, but the music quality started to get a little too hit-or-miss for me. I find "normal" radio services like TuneIn, Pandora, and now iTunes Radio to be an overall better experience.
I am impressed that Grooveshark is still kicking, though, as I don't hear much about them outside of random articles on HN.
That's unfortunte that you've ran into bugs. Make sure to contact [email protected] whenever you encounter something weird and they'll make sure to report it and compensate you ;)
[+] [-] ashray|12 years ago|reply
The thing is that I can find label music on Grooveshark (iTunes top 500 sort of stuff) but I can also easily find the most obscure stuff you can think of. So fan remixes, and regional music (Indian music, Pakistani music, Lebanese music, etc. etc.). The other services out there have a LONG way to go to make that happen.
[+] [-] rcfox|12 years ago|reply
Also, there are a lot of tracks that finish prematurely, are just static, or simply don't play. I've tried flagging them as broken, but Grooveshark keeps adding them to my playlists. There are also tons of tagging issues (ie: there's one album under "Battle Beast" and another under "BATTLE BEAST" for the same band), making it difficult to find things sometimes.
I agree, Grooveshark is the best one out there, but it's far from perfect.
[+] [-] Miyamoto|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oinksoft|12 years ago|reply
For Chuck Brown, I see 21 songs. I have double albums of his with more songs than that. For Rare Essence, there are 17 songs, including a couple duplicates and a misattribution ("One Leg Up" is by Pure Elegance). BYB has 11 songs, NEG has 6, Junkyard has only one (!). These are very prolific bands that have produced tons of records sold in the DC area.
The thing is, nobody ever really "pirated" Go Go music, that is, put it on the internet. Just lots of bootleg cassettes and CDs.
I find Grooveshark to be limited to fairly mainstream and popular music, the kind that at one time or another could be found in record stores across the US/Europe or at least over a very large region within those places.
[+] [-] false|12 years ago|reply
It's been a 2 years long ride. I used Backbone and Zepto on front end, jake for building and managing assets. App uses the same PHP backend as a desktop site.
Ask me anything!
[+] [-] bdz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eLobato|12 years ago|reply
They do pay royalties to some artists, and at least for a while a lot of upcoming artists were advertising their new albums there. I discovered a bunch of great groups through that.
Unrelated with revenue, but I liked how some artists (Avicii comes to mind) ask you what do you think about X song when you play it in Grooveshark, that's some valuable direct feedback. The radios are awesome too.
Can't hide the fact I've been using it for years, but I truly think Grooveshark is the best music streaming service by far. Spotify's catalog is nowhere as large, Pandora misses on so many features, Last.fm recommendations are good but what else do they do...
[+] [-] neya|12 years ago|reply
And I think it's only a good thing. 'Legal/Illegal' are just man-made barriers to access the spirit of freedom to rejoice/discover various cultures/tradition/communities.
I understand that there is a possible monetary loss involved as a side-effect, but I don't think it's much serious as the various Copyright organisations project it to us[1]. If that was how it was, the internet would be piracy free, already.
[1] http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-piracy-boosts-music-sales...
[+] [-] rglover|12 years ago|reply
One thing to note, though, is that they do pretty well with takedowns. For example, I attempted to upload a copyrighted song years ago and uploads were disabled on my account. They also work with publishers and artists to ensure fair compensation is made.
I've paid for the Pro account for a few years now and strongly believe they could do better than their competition if they made the service paid-only.
[+] [-] wyclif|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glennos|12 years ago|reply
http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/28/4668442/grooveshark-settle...
[+] [-] wedraweverting|12 years ago|reply
http://bgr.com/2013/08/28/grooveshark-sony-music-settlement/
[+] [-] dsirijus|12 years ago|reply
As a side note, try out Leap Motion playback controls on GS (in Settings > Subscription, wtf), they're super sweet. I just wave my hands around to control music, it's awesome!
[+] [-] imissmyjuno|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makomk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nnnnni|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wslh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jhsto|12 years ago|reply
With ID3 tagging it's a great way to keep your offline music organized even with devices which do not have Spotify on them.
[+] [-] bliker|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinnyglennon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bliker|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aakashbarot|12 years ago|reply
It also takes care of piracy really well. Its a radio, so there are limitation on you going back and front, at the same time you can listen to the playlist as many times as you want.
User upload their own music: Which means no piracy: You have your paid content you are just broadcasting to larger audience. Like having your own radio station.
[+] [-] Mozai|12 years ago|reply
[09:42:19.907] SyntaxError: in strict mode code, functions may be declared only at top level or immediately within another function @ http://html5.grooveshark.com/build/app.min.js:1
[+] [-] fastest963|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azakai|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notregistering|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fastest963|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timjahn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] um304|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chucknelson|12 years ago|reply
I am impressed that Grooveshark is still kicking, though, as I don't hear much about them outside of random articles on HN.
[+] [-] fastest963|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benbristow|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] auggierose|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VMG|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bliker|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kreddor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hardwaresofton|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexvr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] torbit|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vially|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fastest963|12 years ago|reply