Grooveshark, for those who don’t know, was a streaming music service that recently shut down due to a series of legal challenges.
First of all, let me make clear that I don’t condone music theft or intellectual property theft of any kind. I just assumed grooveshark.com was on the level somehow. Was there denial involved? Probably, a little. I did wonder when I first discovered GS how they could offer up an almost unlimited variety of streaming music for free. But there was a paid premium version, and there were links to purchase the streaming tunes. Also some big artists like the Beatles were notably absent from the site, so I assumed that the music of the artists that were on there had been properly licensed.
Ok, disclaimer aside now, I listen to a lot of music at work, and GS has been a Godsend for that. I’ve listened to the entire musical catalogues of artists that I kind of liked but not enough to purchase their albums in the past. I went through a period of listening to 80s Gangster rap, just because I could (surprisingly better than I thought it to be, some incisive social commentary in between the lyrics about money/drugs/hoes/busting of caps in asses). I listened to my original “12 albums for a dollar” BMI mail order collection when I was 12 or 13- Styx, ELO, Kansas, Journey, Boston, etc. stuff I hadn’t listened to for 30 years or more. Some of it held up pretty well, some not so much. Bands like “Journey” I went from liking at 12-13, to despising as overproduced corporate rock as my musical tastes matured, to kind of liking it again in an ironic/nostalgic way now. I also found quite a bit of indie/nerdcoreish newer music I probably wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
One fun thing I would do is find all the covers I could of old traditional songs like “House of the Rising Sun”, “St. James Infirmary Blues”, “Amazing Grace”, etc. and experience the wife range of styles in which they’ve been covered, from gospel to bluegrass to weird new wave styles.
So what do I do now? I don’t mind paying for a subscription service, but which one has at least close to the amazing breadth and depth of GS? Google Play? Spotify?