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Groooveshark employee here, so excuse me for the shameless plug. ;) We love last.fm but I've always thought it was more for learning about artists and discoveri
by wanderr 16y ago
Groooveshark employee here, so excuse me for the shameless plug. ;) We love last.fm but I've always thought it was more for learning about artists and discovering new ones...and of course tracking everything you listen to and seeing what your friends are listening to. They aren't primarily a streaming music service and cutting those features probably makes it easier for them to cut streaming and licensing costs by being counted purely as a online radio service.
Grooveshark, on the other hand, has the primary focus of letting you search for and listen to whatever you want, but frankly our radio feature isn't as good. So if you want radio with limited control, use last.fm, if you want to listen to what you want to listen to and notghing else, use Grooveshark. :)
- joshfinnie 16y agoI have found this out with my experiments with Grooveshark. The radio feature is TERRIBLE! It takes about 15 minutes before it starts repeating songs; there have been multiple instances where there's no suggestions; it plays bands that you already disliked (or frowned, I guess). </rant> Make your radio feature better and you would have a KILLER app! sincerely, a paying grooveshark user
- wanderr 16y agoI agree, radio is probably our weakest area. We try very hard not to play duplicates, but our underlying data is very messy since most of our content comes from users. Better recs and better deduping are high on my wishlist.
- jbail 16y agoExcuse my cynicism, but what prevents this exact thing from happening to Grooveshark in the future? Wikipedia says Universal Media Group sued you and that's why Apple took your app down from their App Store just two months ago. It also says you got sued by Pink Floyd and had to take down their tunes. It starts small, but using major label music will be death by a thousand cuts.
- wanderr 16y agoI think the last.fm decision was purely about money. Internet radio streaming is significantly cheaper to license than on demand radio. I can't comment on lawsuits but I think the Wikipedia article is inaccurate. We remove tracks voluntarily so not every takedown is accompanied by a lawsuit. :)
- tomjen3 16y agoThats not really fair to Groveshark - I have enjoyed searching for artists and listening to a lot of their tracks. The only issue (but it is a big one) is the complete reliance on flash and the inability to integrate with my pause, forward stop buttons on my keyboard.
- wanderr 16y agoThe destop app supports media keys, with installation of the appropriate platform specific helpers. :) As far as I know, no sites support media keys directly because browsers don't make them available, even to extensions. If anyone has example sites that can do this we'd love to see them...and figure out how they are doing it. ;)
- xiongchiamiov 16y agoI agree that Last.fm is for statistics-gathering, and Grooveshark is for listening to what you want, but for radio, it's all about Pandora. BTW, I really appreciate TinySong.