Music from the Cloud, part 2
It’s really amazing how one longs to get distracted when there are massive amounts of stuff to do. My law school exams are coming up yet again, and guess what I’m preoccupied with? You guessed that right – streaming music services. Just like before.
Anyway, my endless searches and somebody’s advice finally led me to a decent ‘net radio service. The thing is called Grooveshark. It’s loaded with cool features, most of which are free!
Most importantly, Grooveshark uses an awesome business strategy – “Get the basics free, pay extra for more yummy stuff!”, which is successfully used for years by many services, including Google Docs, Dropbox, DeviantArt… erm… John the Ripper, and many other places. Now this is so much better than the “free for a couple of countries, 30-song trial period for the rest of the world” strategy used by some competitors, lol.
Grooveshark supports playlists, shuffles & repeats (things that VKontakte lacks), and most importantly, suggestion of similar songs and artists and genre radio stations, which are all real benefits. You can also annoy your facebook pals by posting what you listen to on your wall, or scrobble to last.fm (as if anyone needs last.fm anyway), and other stuff – all completely free.
Needless to say, nobody’s completely perfect. The free version has a sidebar with ads (easily disabled here, though), the on-line client is somewhat heavy and cumbersome, the songs are poorly organized and not everything I’d like to hear is on there yet. But as the creators say, they’re only just beginning, so I’d expect the service to change for the better. To encourage the makers, I’d suggest that we occasionally click on ads, or better still, get a paid subscription.
Have a melodic day!