I am not going to discuss the Grooveshark music service in detail - you can go to the service's Wikipedia entry or to the Grooveshark.com site itself if that's what you want - but will merely say a few things about my experience with the service in this post.
I did a fair amount of music listening at MP3.com during its heyday. MP3.com's music offerings were mostly chaff and not so much wheat, but that never bothered me: swimming through the chaff was all part of the listening experience, as I saw it. The MP3.com site is still extant, although it is only a faint shadow of what it used to be. It hosts 250 songs that can be streamed or downloaded; there are no selections from big-name artists as there once was. Parts of the site are dysfunctional or haven't been updated for a couple of years.
I had a small collection of MP3.com favorites that I listened to time and again. I was able to download some but not all of these songs - I still have those .mp3s, BTW. One favorite that I wasn't able to download was This Holiday Life's "Come and Remain", which I like for its U2-ish anthemic feel. Fast-forward to the present: after I sorted out my Internet situation here in California, I did a Google search for "Come and Remain" on the chance that I might find a site at which I could play it. Gratifyingly, my search turned up a Grooveshark.com page that hooked me up with the listen I was looking for.
Grooveshark is a service that allows its users to freely stream songs but not download them, and that's just fine with me: believe me when I say that I don't want a bunch of files cluttering up my hard disk. A wide variety of music is available at Grooveshark.com. If you're up for a Muzio Clementi sonatina, a Luciano Pavarotti aria, or a Hossam Ramzy belly dance (you'll have to supply the dancer ;-)), Grooveshark's got you covered.
Ah, but what about the depth of the Grooveshark library? I can report that it's pretty impressive, at least as far as popular music is concerned. Let's put the Grooveshark "Search for songs, artists, genres" widget to work:
• "Killing Me Softly (with His Song)" was made famous by Roberta Flack but was originally recorded by Lori Lieberman. Never heard Lieberman's version? Grooveshark's got it.
• In the late 1970s, "Responsibility" and "I'll Be Waiting" from Robert Johnson's Close Personal Friend got a lot of airplay on KMET, which I briefly discussed in the previous entry. Johnson is a relatively obscure artist and Close Personal Friend is his only record, and I wasn't expecting to find Close Personal Friend's tracks at Grooveshark.com, but they're there. Wow.
• When Huey Lewis and the News released "Heart and Soul", I thought, "I've heard this song before." "Heart and Soul" had in fact been recorded twice previously, and the first of these versions, by Exile (the "Kiss You All Over" guys), did indeed get a bit of airplay. Exile's "Heart and Soul" is longer and more interesting than Lewis's version; you unfortunately won't hear the former on the radio today but you can listen to it at Grooveshark.com. (The second "Heart and Soul" was by The Bus Boys: I couldn't find this version at Grooveshark but I did find it here.)
Imagine being able to call up a radio station and request a song and get it played immediately, without having to worry about the 'tastes' of the station's DJs, management, and advertisers - Grooveshark is somewhat like that.
I say "somewhat" because there are some conspicuous gaps in the Grooveshark library - run a Grooveshark search for the Beatles and see what happens - prompting the questions:
(1) Where does Grooveshark's music come from?
(2) Is the Grooveshark service legal in the first place?
To my understanding, users provide the great majority of Grooveshark's content although, per the Copyright subsection of Wikipedia's Grooveshark entry, Grooveshark employees seem to be responsible for some of it.
I can't answer the second question with certainty, but I suspect the answer is "no".
• Wikipedia notes that Grooveshark has been sued by all of the major music companies - this does seem like the sort of thing that would put the music industry in high dudgeon, doesn't it?
• Some Grooveshark song listings are in disguised form: for example, one "21st Century Schizoid Man" listing is for a song from Kkiinngg-Ccrriimmssoonn's Ttthhee-Ccoouurrtt-ooff-tthhee-Ccrriimmssoonn-Kkiinngg album - listen to it here (Robert Fripp has locked horns with Grooveshark over its hosting of his music). Would this be the case if the Grooveshark service were completely lawful? I don't think so.
I can see why record companies and artists would be upset with Grooveshark, but there's very much a limit to which I can sympathize with these parties given the awful state of today's radio listening experience. Moreover, I own hundreds of records and have been to my fair share of music shows, so it's not as though I don't have any 'skin in the game', so to speak. Grooveshark's detractors can throw stones at me if they want but as long as Grooveshark is around I'm going to avail myself of it.
Leading by example
Let me conclude this entry by noting that you can listen to "stations" at the Grooveshark Genres pane. I listened to the "Classic Rock" station for a while today: in addition to hits from Rush, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the Steve Miller Band, I heard off-the-beaten-path songs by Styx ("Edge of the Century"), Thin Lizzy ("Brought Down"), Mountain ("Roll Over Beethoven"), the Grateful Dead ("Little Nemo in Nightland"), and Fleetwood Mac ("Morning Rain") - there was even a song by The Tragically Hip ("Pretend"). Can you now see the difference between programming that is run by music fans vs. programming that is meant to maximize advertising revenue?
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