grooveshark

The jukebox in the sky is a reality. When I started this blog two years ago, it was all but impossible to open a Web browser, type a song name, and have that song start playing immediately. Now, it's commonplace.

I still like the simple approach of Grooveshark--the other night, my brother and I set up a running DJ battle on it to reminisce and introduce each other to new tunes--but Meuzer is an interesting alternative. Search on a song or artist name, and Meuzer pulls results from YouTube--very similar to the Muziic app I looked at earlier … Read more

If you're not using Grooveshark to try out music on-demand before buying it, you should be. I've found no other service that offers its combination of simplicity, features, and song selection--10 million and growing, according to the organization.

Today, Grooveshark announced a couple of extensions that should increase awareness. If you're on Facebook like most of the world seems to be, Grooveshark Share Song will let you share any song in Grooveshark's database in only three steps. There are other Facebook apps that offer similar features--iLike has been offering full-song playback on Facebook since last August… Read more

The rumor mill has been all atwitter about a link from Seeqpod's newly sparse home page to the search page for Microsoft's Web site. (Not to be confused with Live Search, Microsoft's Internet search engine.)

Seeqpod was a playable search engine for music files--essentially, its crawlers scoured Web sites looking for MP3 files, then it transformed those MP3s into streamable audio files. It offered its own user-facing Web page, as well as APIs for third-party sites, and was used as the back-end for Songerize (which no longer works) and Bandloop. After being hit by copyright infringement lawsuits … Read more

Free, on-demand streaming music is a rising tide: since the start of 2009, I've covered relatively new services like Spotify and Just Hear It, and there are plenty of established players like MySpace Music, Imeem, and Grooveshark.

Instead of trying to stop the tide, Sony Music has wisely embraced it: starting today, the company will introduce streaming music players on the Web sites of its most popular artists, including popsters like Kelly Clarkson, John Legend, and Jacko himself. It makes perfect business sense: instead of letting some third party like Imeem sell advertisements against high-demand music, Sony can sell … Read more

Monday, I downloaded a new iPhone app called iHeartNewMusic that helps you track new music via blogs. If you're the type of listener who scours music blogs regularly to find out about and sample new tunes, iHeartNewMusic will let you do that from your iPhone over a Wi-Fi connection.

According to the iHeartNewMusic blog, Apple rejected iHeartNewMusic six times before finally accepting it. The blog doesn't detail why, but the application is pretty simplistic--it's basically a customized version of Safari with a list of bookmarks to dozens of blogs in categories such as Rock, Electro, Indie, and … Read more

Count on CNET readers to set me straight: within minutes of my post about Just Hear It, two people had e-mailed me about Grooveshark, which not only offers on-demand playback of millions of songs, but includes album art, fully functional playlists (complete with a very useful "add to queue" feature), and a chart of most popular plays. Equally important, the site displays advertisements, which means that somebody is collecting money, presumably to disburse to the artists whose music is played through the site. This, along with the fact that Grooveshark's been operating for more than two years, … Read more

Twisten is a new music service from the creators of Grooveshark. If you're listening to something and want to share it with your friends on Twitter you can simply type in the track name and it will automatically add a link for playback inside a tweet. Anyone who clicks it can listen to the entire thing for free over at Grooveshark Lite.

The service keeps an eye on Twitter for mentions of music tracks people are listening to and cross references the titles and artist information from the Grooveshark music database. If it finds a match, it inserts an … Read more

Although there are a slew of music-streaming services across the Web, they're not created equal. But if you find the right service to match your music style, you'll quickly realize that finding the best song for a particular occasion isn't as hard as it once was.

Grooveshark

Including Grooveshark in the list of the top five music-streaming services may surprise some since it doesn't get the kind of attention Last.fm or Pandora does. But with the help of an outstanding search interface that lets users find a slew of songs by artist, album, or song, … Read more