Grooveshark

From AppScout:

There’s a reason Grooveshark is so popular: It’s one of the most expansive, customizable, and feature-rich streaming music services on the Web, and it’s completely free to use. You can upload your own music collection and stream it from anywhere you go. You can also search for practically any song or artist you can think of, find it, and stream it instantly over the Web. Grooveshark also allows you to save playlists, bookmark and favorite songs, network with other users, share your favorites on Facebook, Twitter, and even embed widgets on your blog.

Today, Grooveshark unveiled a new version of their Web service, which retains its familiar, easy-to-use look and feel but adds a ton of new features. The last time we reviewed Grooveshark we found it a great service, but the new version comes with customizable themes to fit your mood, faster song searching and streaming, smarter playlists, more sharing options, and a more jukebox-like feel that will make users coming from desktop apps much more comfortable with the layout.

Grooveshark’s VIP users — who pay a subscription fee of $3/month or $30/year to have access to the site without ads, to preview and beta test new features, and to get priority support and service if they need it — have already been using the new version. The service depends on the VIP users to report issues, suggest feature improvements, and test drive their new tweaks. Now, after weeks of testing, the developers at Grooveshark are ready to make their improvements available to all users.

New Grooveshark - SidebarThe new version of Grooveshark comes with improvements both under the hood and to the interface and design of the service. Users will first notice that the layout has changed to look more like a traditional music player. You have quick access to your playlists, music library, Grooveshark friends, and favorite tracks right from the left sidebar.

The sidebar gives you quicker access to your most commonly used features and playlists. Even smart playlists, popular songs, and songs currently queued are available from the sidebar. In the previous design, you had to click at least two or three times on the icons under the search bar to get to the same information, and if you needed to go back you had to use breadcrumbs at the top of the page.

New Grooveshark - ThemesAdditionally, the new Grooveshark comes with a dozen themes you can use to customize the layout and display of your window. You can use the default display if you want to keep it clean, or switch to one of the user-designed themes to spice up your listening experience. The layout of the Grooveshark window has changed as well. It adapts itself to the size of your browser window, preventing you from having to scroll side to side on small displays or wasting a ton of screen real estate on large ones.

New Grooveshark - QueueThe developers behind Grooveshark put a lot of work into making the new version feel more like a music player. Rather than cram the queued songs and the playback controls into the same area at the bottom of the window, they slimmed down the playback controls so you can easily play, pause, or skip between queued songs. They also turned the entire bottom of the Grooveshark player into the queued songs window. If you just want to see the name of the next song or the songs you’ve already played, you can minimize the list that spans the bottom of the screen. Alternatively, if you like seeing the album art for the songs in your playlist, you can enlarge it.

Sharing and management features have also been simplified. To add a song to your playlist, just click the plus-sign next to the song title, and if you want to share the song on Facebook, StumbleUpon, or Twitter, click the envelope next to the song title. There are additional buttons next to the song title that make it easy to add a song to your library, favorite the song, or even download it or its ringtone to your computer. If the song is already playing, hover the mouse anywhere over the progress bar to see all of those options in a pop-up dialog, which also includes buttons to create a widget of the song, flags it as poor quality, and links to the artist’s library.

NewGrooveshark - PlayerGrooveshark also allows you to skip back or forward through individual songs — a long-overdue feature that the previous version lacked. Additionally, the Grooveshark Radio feature is more prominent in the new version: simply click the “Radio” button to turn it on or off. This is much clearer than the spinning gear indicator in the previous version.

Under the hood, Grooveshark developers have added song pre-loading, so tracks that are added to your queue start buffering even when the songs before them are still playing. This means you won’t have to wait for songs to buffer quite so often, and you won’t have to deal with a song starting to play and then cutting out because it hasn’t had time to download the stream. Additionally, the entire feel of the service is smoother, sharper, and gets you to your music faster.

Grooveshark was already a winning service in my book, but the new design and layout are substantial improvements that make it much easier to use and more accessible to first-time users, or users who already use desktop apps or other streaming music services. Add to this the fact that Grooveshark has one of the deepest and richest catalogs of high-quality streaming music from artists of all genres and multiple major labels, and you have a pretty strong combination of form and function.

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As you may have read already today, Grooveshark and EMI Music Group have signed a licensing agreement after months of negotiations.

We’re also equally excited to announce a partnership with Silverback Records who represent awesome artists like Sublime and Slightly Stoopid.

This is great news, and everyone here at Grooveshark is thrilled to be working with as many music rights holders as possible–and helping both fans and musicians find a music home on the web. As more and more people look for a way to experience all the music they love–whether it’s on the web, on their phone, or discovering and loving new artists–Grooveshark will continue to help both musicians and their fans to find the best music experience out there.

And to hear what other people are saying, check out some coverage on:

TechCrunch
AllThingsDigital
ReadWriteWeb
FayerWayer (in Spanish)

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Last week we launched a new service called Grooveshark VIP, hooking users into the best that we have to offer. Some folks have been asking exactly what makes VIP users so special. Other than helping support Grooveshark and being generally very attractive people, what are the benefits?

1) No advertisements on Grooveshark. As much as we enjoy delivering your eyeballs to our corporate sponsor overlords, we feel like pure, uninterrupted connection to the music is more important. VIPs never see any advertisements, getting the full experience in all its musical glory.

2) Cool kids on the block. Grooveshark VIPs get first access to all the newest and truest we have to offer. From exclusive features and options to brand new product launches, you get the funnest music toys on the web before anyone else.

3) Get your voice heard. While you’re trying out all of Grooveshark’s awesome new features, be sure to tell us what you think. VIP users not only get priority support from our team, but as a tester of what’s new we really take your opinion to heart.

So help us out, and we’ll take the best care of you we know how. Got anymore questions? Leave a comment or ask us directly on Twitter.

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For the past year, Grooveshark has been in talks with EMI Records and other copyright holders to negotiate licensing agreements for the use of their content. We are pleased to announce that over the past few months Grooveshark successfully concluded mutually beneficial agreements with artists, labels, and publishers that we hope to be a template for other such agreements with additional copyright holders.

Recently, EMI Records chose to abandon the template we’ve built with the help of other major copyright holders and opted for their traditional intimidation tactic of filing a lawsuit as a negotiating tool. We find the use of this negotiating strategy counterproductive, as Grooveshark has been willing to conclude an agreement with EMI Records that is economically sustainable for both EMI Records and a start-up company the size of Grooveshark.

Grooveshark is run by a group of young and passionate musicians. We love music, we make music, and we believe that the use of all music should be paid for. We adopted this core philosophy at our inception and to date have concluded agreements with hundreds of record labels, major US performance rights organizations, and thousands of independent artists who support Grooveshark’s business model. (See: Grooveshark Artists)

As musicians, we support the rights of copyright holders and strive to sign sustainable agreements with all content owners, ensuring that all artists get paid–or we agree to remove content from our system in accordance with our DMCA Takedown Policy. We hope that EMI Records eventually follows the lead of the many forward-thinking labels we are already working with, who would rather get their artists exposure and a fair share of our revenue than block content access and force customers to illegal networks.

We understand that the economy of the digital music business is in a state of flux, and we hope to help ease this transition by providing the required new tools and services that lead to the next generation of the music industry. We respect the ownership rights of the major labels and publishers, and our core mission has always been to compete with piracy by offering a service that is genuinely better than what illegal networks offer, while also ensuring fair payment to copyright holders. Our next important step on our road to success is to conclude a mutually beneficial agreement with EMI Records that is sustainable for both EMI and Grooveshark.

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Remember that little link we had on Grooveshark for the past few weeks annoyingly nagging politely asking if you’d vote for Grooveshark in CNET’s 2009 Webware Awards?

We work hard here at Grooveshark, and simply put: we’re delighted just to know that all the late hours and energy drink abuse is worth it to you guys. And while you folks are out in the world being awesome 24/7 365, we’ll be here ready to bring the music you love.

Thanks for voting for us at Grooveshark! from ben westermann-clark on Vimeo.

Speaking of music, I mentioned last week that our quickest way to share tunes has a new (even quicker) hangout. Tinysong, Grooveshark’s baby brother, sprouted legs and got involved with awesome Web 2.0 sharing site Ping.fm. If you aren’t familiar, Ping.fm is one of the funnest* sites for keeping your social (network) life current.

Even cooler: they’re out first partner of our brand new Tinysong API. Say what? Tinysong now gives developers access to the Grooveshark catalog of (millions+millions of) songs–and a simple way to call a quick link to any one of them. Damn.

Talk about the music spreading: check out Grooveshark for Wordpress. It’s our latest launch, letting you post playlists to your Wordpress blogs. What up? And once you post some music to your blog, be sure to let me know in the comments!

*Yes, I know ‘funnest’ isn’t a word. Well it is now.

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Ping!

While us sharks were swimming down into the deepest depths of the dark water of music, we resurfaced with something pretty cool: a new API. As of today, any interested developers or music aficionados can use the Grooveshark Tinysong API to get links to absolutely any song in our collection.

Want to be able to grab a link to almost any tune in the world dynamically on your site? Check it.

Even cooler: while we were swimming the ocean blue, we got hailed by a cool new partner to help launch our new API–Ping.fm. Probably the easiest way to dispatch updates to multiple social sites at once (and definitely the coolest), today Ping.fm launched some new updates to their service; including a kick-ass implementation of Tinysong that lets their users instantly blast tunes to their friends all across the web.

So check them out. Check us out. And check out our inbox if you have any cool ideas, thoughts, or suggestions for an integration with our newest and bluest API.

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