The Tech Enthusiast

Grooveshark is an internationally available online music search engine, music streaming service and music recommendation web software application, allowing users to search for, stream, and upload music free of charge that can be played immediately or added to a playlist.

Grooveshark streams 400 to 450 million songs per month, to more than 29,000,000 users. As of April 2009, its audience was growing at a rate of 2–3% per day.

Depending on what internet your own(really some people think the internet is made up of myspace, geocities and aol still) you may or may not have heard about Grooveshark.  Grooveshark is possibly one of the finest examples of HTML5 known to the human race.  It’s a music player, with it’s own search engine, all accessible from your web browser.  Here’s a screen shot of the monster in the act;

To the naked eye it just looks like a drastically improved iTunes, but actually it’s something completely different. 

Here’s a list of my favorite features;

Not tied to other programs or hardware

With iTunes, you must have a Mac or suffer on windows.  If you use Zune, then it’s only good on windows.  Respectively, if you have Apple hardware(iPhone, iPod, iPad, etc) or Microsoft Hardware(Zune or Windows 7 Phone) you must use their matching desktop software.  Grooveshark is web based and works anywhere. 

Bloatfree

The bitch about iTunes or Zune is that it’s bloated and too tightly integrated with their own stores.  Grooveshark is fast, light and free.

Player, Discovery, Manager and Server

Grooveshark is not only a music player, but also a manager and server.  You can add songs to a playlist or your library and then access from any other computer. You can upload and buy straight from the web, No crazy sync setups required.

Social

You can also share your music, via email, facebook, twitter, etc..  You can also embed a widget with certain songs. Have a playlist of favourite songs?  Make a widget based on the list, that way new favourites is automatically added to your site.

Grooveshark Anywhere

For $3 a month or $30 a year you can enjoy Grooveshark Anywhere.  The benefits are that it’s ad free, it give mobile access and you get a desktop app.  Plus it helps support and feed the hard working people that make this possible.

Overall, I strongly recommend Grooveshark.  It’s fast, quick and clean.