Grooving with the Sharks

-or- How I got a Grooveshark account

I caught a blurb about Grooveshark Lite this morning and decided to give it a look (see, Twitter can provide value). While I know very little about Grooveshark itself, I have to say that the Lite version is very cool!

Grooveshark Lite

Got a song or group stuck in your head? Head over to the Lite site, use the search and start streaming. Just that simple and easy. Kinda like Pandora, but with the ability to actually specify what you want to hear.

As you find songs, add ‘em to a queue or playlist and before you know it you have a day’s worth of music queued up and playing. With the shuffle option, this alone is reason to come back. I heard all sorts of good stuff today!

While clicking around, check out the “Popular” section to see what other folks are up to. I clearly listen to different radio stations than most Grooveshark Lite users but I found some good stuff there all the same.

Oh, and I wasn’t knocking Pandora earlier, mind you. That little gem has helped me discover tons of new bands and songs.

Grooveshark (full)

Since I was having so much fun with Grooveshark Lite, I thought I might have a look at Grooveshark (not lite). With a tag line of “Listen to any song in the world for free” it certainly looks interesting. Here’s the pitch:

Grooveshark is an online music sharing community that rewards you for sharing your music.

• Grooveshark allows you to safely and legally download high quality MP3s.
• Grooveshark is a peer to peer program with a massive library of songs.
• Grooveshark allows you to interact with other music lovers like yourself.
• Grooveshark rewards you for sharing your music, and gives you a cut of the profits for songs you sell.

I tried to sign up, but I didn’t have a invite code so nothing happened. However, I did manage to find a little work-around to that… I popped back over to the Lite site and registered over there. Then, back to the main site, I was able to login with that newly created userid and password. Clever, no?

Ok, I really have no idea if it was clever or not. Maybe that “welcome” email will show up soon (but not yet, as of 3 hours later) so maybe that was a useful tip. I felt clever at the time…

Next, I downloaded Sharkbyte and turned it loose on my music library. Honestly, I dunno what it is up to yet — still running and looks like it’ll be busy for a while.

[later]

Ah ha! Sharkbyte needs to be running if I want to actually play my music from anywhere/any browser. Well that beats the heck out of syncing my MP3 library to my work laptop! Granted, it is yet another client to have sitting in the tray on the home machine…

Did you catch that? Play your music library from anywhere, as long as the “host” machine is online and running Sharkbyte. Create playlists and play right from the browser. Yeah, that’s actually cool.

And that’s as far as I’ve gone so far. Later I’ll need to explore the social and profits aspects. If you’ve been using either of these services, drop a note with your comments — I’m curious to hear what other people think about GS compared to Pandora and Last.FM.

Summarized

Grooveshark Lite = slick online player. Search and play, no account necessary, no install, no fuss.

Grooveshark = social music, remote access to your library, some sort of legal profit model.

Possibly Related posts:

1. Pandora – Holiday music
2. last.fm + Pandora = PandoraFM
3. Music Projects
4. Holiday Tunes
5. Pandora Related Tidbits