GrooveShark is a free alternative to Last.fm!

It is strange that so far this service has gone unnoticed on Habré: after all, many here 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 a flash - and you can listen to your favorite music, upload your tracks, share playlists and much more! GrooveShark’s interface is completely Flash-based and reminds iTunes a lot: on the left are playlists, favorites, friends and search. The center from the search form mutates into the current playlist or list of tracks :) Everything is simple and intuitive. The navigation was nicely done: you can use the browser’s ← / → buttons without rebooting: the 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 tidy: names, artists, albums, covers. There are even a number of Russian songs in the collection and you can easily find Pugacheva :) A superficial check also showed that the resource does not bypass any of the famous music genres: from country to gothic EBM.

The “sociality” of the player is also up to par: each track can be marked with a heart, or 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 - it works much nicer than similar recommendations at Last.fm :) Of course, you can follow individuals with similar tastes.

Against the backdrop of constantly stupid recent clashes with copyright, the question immediately pops up: does the service work legally? Do not close? No :) Grooveshark.com has agreed with EMI, one of the largest music copyright holders. The general meaning of the October 13 press release is as follows: EMI Music and EMI Music Publishing provide website users with access to the content of these labels for free online. The site also says that Grooveshark.com is committed to compensating the copyright holder for every track they listen to on their pages.

You can upload your tracks in MP3 format to the service: in the search results, preference is given to the maximum bitrate and sampling. The track can be shared with friends :)

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

Enjoy, gentlemen! :)

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

UPD2 : Iboong discovered a chrome grooveshark-ad-remover plugin for killing ads.