The never-ending supply of sites claiming to offer free, quality, streaming music has left us with a string of corpses. Sites like Muxtape were killed by recording studios and Pandora (praise be) appears to be on its last legs. It seems that between the rising costs of streaming and licensing behavior that can best be described as erratic, my favorite repositories are fixing to shove off or have already died. As services fade one by one, I was happy to find Grooveshark in my endless search for an endless supply of music.
The site’s home interface is like Google for music. Dominating the center of the screen is little more than a logo and a search box. Querying a title or an artist generates a refreshingly simple list of possible (and more importantly, relevant) matches. Clicking on any one result will get you listening to the tunes straight away.
There’s no registration, no fuss, and no eccentric plugin. Grooveshark is just a clean and robust Flash-based interface that has clearly been shaped to deliver great music.
Regarding great music, I was able to find some exceptionally rare songs that took me months to acquire for my personal collection. In an even more surprising twist, I was able to locate remixes that are elusive on services like Amazon or iTunes, much less a streaming music service.
Of greatest importance is audio fidelity, and Grooveshark delivers in spades for a web service. Bass is deep, treble is clear, and the service is pleasantly clipping-free. Grooveshark may not be FLAC or 320kbps VBR MP3, but I’ll be damned if it’s not fantastic.
While I’m not typically apt to embed music on a site, there’s no better way to demonstrate the power of Grooveshark than to rock the electro-funk of Daft Punk. This embedded widget was generated with the touch of a single button:
I’m not sure how Grooveshark does the voodoo that they do, but they do it so well. Grooveshark, I think I love you!
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