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The Grooveshark company was founded in USA 2006 by three students at University of Florida where Sam Tarantino and Josh Greenberg are two of them. After some bad pre-versions of Grooveshark the official release came in late 2008. The current version is a basic website where the user types a query and finds what he wants after just pressing enter, that is like Google, YouTube or Flickr but with music. Grooveshark has from the beginning been available all over the world for free and financed by advertising.
With a library of around 22 million tracks it is the largest music service on paper but due to that multiple uploads of the same song can occur it’s believed that there is around 15 million unique tracks which makes it comparable to Spotify. The world wide access also makes it to the most used service to date with more than 27 million active users per month. Groovesharks web based interface can be accessed without any registration needed although a registered user has the benefit of saving and sharing playlists.
Besides the free version there is two other versions named “Grooveshark Plus” and “Grooveshark anywhere” which allows the users to download a desktop software and get more information about new releases. The anywhere version gives access from mobile-devices and both versions are free from advertises.
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Grooveshark Plus -
6$/month
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Grooveshark anywhere -
9$/month
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Grooveshark allows users to upload music which gives the service a broader market. The quality of the songs varies but the usual bit rate is 192 kbit/s in mp3 format. Streaming is made only from servers using UDP protocol.
www.grooveshark.com
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