Grooveshark review

The Grooveshark app for your iPhone and iPod touch is was here, and it lets you listen to a huge selection of music files on demand for a subscription fee of $3/month or $30/year. Grooveshark was available for Free in the App Store, for a very limited period of time and had a free 30 day trial to check out the Grooveshark service in a “Sneak Peek”. Unfortunately, the Grooveshark app has been pulled off the App Store due to legal issues, details below. You can still download Grooveshark if you have a jailbroken device using Cydia. Here’s the nitty gritty on the Grooveshark service and iPhone app.

Finding music: Its like bag of mixed nuts. You don’t know what you’ll get, but you might like one. Grooveshark revolves around searching. When the app starts, the only thing you can do is search for a song by name or artist, and from the results pick a song to start listening. Searches are not auto-completed though which slightly aggravating. The search results are a big mixed bag of songs, artists, and anything else that matches your keyword search. If you favor details super organized, categorized and orderly, this might get on your nerves. Also some of the songs I found were incomplete, needless to say I hope Grooveshark can fathom a way to weed out these dopey 30 second songs from their system.

When you find a new song, tap the little blue arrow to get to all the options for a song. If you’re already playing another song, you can avoid interrupting the flow by choosing to play it “next”, “last”, add to “favs” or just play it now. Playlists can be easily created from songs you find in Grooveshark by choosing “add to playlist”. Speaking of playlists, you can save any set of songs from your Queue as a playlists, which is cleverly thought out. Songs can also be “made available offline”.

In the Grooveshark app settings you can adjust offline prefs, change storage amount, or delete all your offline music. Here you can also choose higher bitrates for playback, change your Grooveshark credentials and choose to enable Radio by default.

The Now Playing section is Grooveshark app is full of useful functionality. You can control song playback using a slider, adjust the volume, view the album artwork, pause, play, and skip to the next/previous song in your Queue. Tap the heart button to add the song to your favorites. From here you can also turn on the Radio mode which will play similar songs in a row for you. Optimize what Grooveshark Radio thinks you’ll like by tapping either the smiley or frowning face during playback.

The app doesn’t run in the background as of now, which is a bummer of course. On a positive note, Grooveshark does keep your song position active, so when you close and reopen the app, your song starts to play from where you left off. Pretty neat!

Overall, I think the $3 price tag on Grooveshark is attractive. It’s different from other services like MOG, Rhapsody, Thumbplay, and Rdio where you have to shell out $10 a month, so it might be absorbed as a discretionary expense rather than a bill. Though you get what you pay for, and with Grooveshark like I mentioned before the content isn’t 100% accurate and consistent. You won’t find all albums for all artists, but you will find some pretty rare music, and not find some pretty big ones too. If you’re wondering why Grooveshark content is so sporadic, here’s why. I had no idea but apparently the content on Grooveshark is uploaded by users, which is then licensed by Grooveshark through the labels that own the songs. So as Grooveshark settles with more record labels, more songs will be made available, and who knows it just might stick around for a while for all of us to enjoy. You don’t need to shell out any cash or hand over a credit card number. It’s a free 30 day trial, so you can’t go wrong. Once they add multitasking support, I can personally see paying $3/month for this.

Update: The Grooveshark iPhone app has been pulled from the App Store after some record companies voiced their complaints to Apple. Here is a quote from the Grooveshark blog talking about the app being pulled.

Earlier this afternoon, Apple sent us a letter notifying us that, due to a complaint they received from Universal Music Group UK, Grooveshark for iPhone has been, strangely, pulled from the App Store.

This comes as an absolute surprise to us, and we are not sleeping until we figure out exactly how to fix this—and get Grooveshark for iPhone back in the App Store. Above all, our biggest concern is damaging the service we provide to all of you guys—our loyal (awesome) users.

If you’ve already downloaded the app, keep enjoying it. We’re going to keep working hard to provide the best services we possibly can across the web, BlackBerry, Android, Palm WebOS, Symbian, and everywhere else you love your music—including the iPhone.

AppSafari Rating: 3.5/5

AppSafari review of Grooveshark was written by Joe Seifi on August 12th, 2010 and categorized under App Store, Featured, Music, Net. Page viewed 12991 times, 1 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.