Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on August 23, 2008 by CyberNet.

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It’s always interesting to see how many companies are up for the challenge of making a name for themselves in the online music industry. There are plenty of them with different business models and varying services, but the common ground among them are that they use the Internet to provide a way for people to listen to music. A fairly new service that we discovered thanks to Mashable is called Grooveshark Lite, made by Grooveshark.com (their peer-to-peer model) which some of you may be familiar with.

Today we’ll be taking at what Grooveshark Lite is all about.

What is Grooveshark?

Grooveshark Lite looks promising after testing it out. One thing that stood out was the interface – it simply looks good. But a site just can’t look good, it has to offer value to users as well. Grooveshark does this by offering a nice selection of music for users to stream from the Grooveshark library. You can search for your favorite artists, create playlists, get recommendations, and save songs you enjoy to a favorites list. It also has a social aspect as well by giving users the option to share songs with friends.

Mashable helps describe the service by saying, “If Pandora had a love child with Last.fm, it’s name would be Grooveshark Lite.” If you are familiar with Pandora, and you are familiar with Last.fm, you will have a decent idea as to what Grooveshark Lite offers.

Autoplay

The Autoplay feature is what makes this service remind us somewhat of Pandora. Once you add a song or two to your queue, you can click the Autoplay feature and it will start playing songs they think you’ll like based upon the songs that you added.

Like Pandora where you rate a song with a thumbs-up or a thumbs down, Grooveshark allows you to rate songs as well. Their system involves clicking a smiley face or a frown face if you like or don’t like one of the songs they automatically start playing for you.

Below is the guide they give you which shows what the various buttons are for if you are using the Autoplay feature.

Notice that you can also favorite songs which then get added to a Favorites list. If you don’t like one of the songs it automatically plays for you, you can skip the song. You can also delete songs from the queue as well.

Grooveshark Lite Features

Download the songs that you like:

If you come across a song that you like, they provide the link to download the song. If you decide to use this feature, you’ll be taken to their main site, Grooveshark.com. The log-in that you use for Grooveshark Lite is the same login you use for the main site. From what I saw, it looked like most downloads are around 99 cents, but you can also earn credit towards music downloads by sharing the music you have available on your computer. More details on that can be found here.

Search for your favorite artists:

When you perform a search by artist, for example, it will return all kinds of results like:

• Songs that match your search criteria
• Other artists
• Albums
• Playlists that others have created

I performed a search for “Daughtry” and by clicking on “songs,” I was able to see a whole list of songs he has recorded and then play them. Clicking on “albums” showed me the various albums he has worked on.

The Playlists feature is also nice because it will display playlists that users have created which match your search, and then you can view which songs they included. This can also be a great way to discover new music. One of the playlists I came across for the “Daughtry” search had some songs by the group but other songs by artists I wasn’t familiar with.

Oh, and we can’t forget to mention that you can create your own playlists too, which is a must-have these days.

Similar Songs

Once you perform a search for a song and then click on it, you’ll see a whole list of Similar Songs. This is one feature that reminds us of Last.fm because they too have a “Similar Tracks” feature. Below is a comparison of the Similar Songs/Tracks Grooveshark Lite and Last.fm offered for the same song:

Wrapping it up

Grooveshark Lite definitely offers a lot to their users, our only concern is whether they too will struggle with dealing with the music industry like some services currently are.

Check it out and let us know what you think…

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