That was quick: Grooveshark disappears from the Google Play Store (again) | Hacker News Reader

That was quick: Grooveshark disappears from the Google Play Store (again)

thenextweb.com

32 pointsmtgx15 comments

Last week I was using grooveshark at home, when suddenly it opened a new tab showing that malicious "Windows Update" virus advertisement. This has been a problem with grooveshark in the past, and it's very ridiculous that they haven't sorted it out yet.

There are a whole heap of issues it is ridiculous that they have not worked out. Mislabeled songs, incomplete songs, poorly organized library, low quality tracks, viruses, partial albums.... etc...

And from what I understand also they haven't sorted out the whole licensing issue behind the music they serve.

I don't get why people like Grooveshark. It's like LimeWire in a webapp. I thought we had collectively moved past that.

I'd say that the ability to play any song (with playlists) without needing to install anything (Spotify) or pay money (Rhapsody) is the reason.

I agree with both you, and the poster above you.

But I still wonder, how is Grooveshark still online legally? They let people upload their music and other people listen to it. It's basically Napster in 2012.

There is a subset of music that is not available on the Spotify/Rdio net, for various reasons. If you don't have iTunes Match/Google Music/Amazon Cloud Player with this subset synced into, what do you do when you want to listen to a song now? You might find it on YouTube, or you might find it on Grooveshark.

People like it because it is LimeWire in a webapp.

Actually, scratch that -- they like it because it lets them listen to whatever the song they want to listen to, whereever they want to listen to it. As far as I know, nobody has that kind of selection anywhere else.

Youtube does, and is used as a main music player for a lot of people.

Yes, but youtube doesn't have an offline player feature and if it did, the videos would still be larger than Grooveshark audio.

But it is inconvinient for large playlists and is not, primerially designed for playing video.

I thought we got past regional bullcrap in 21st century as well. But as long as all other digital music stores and streaming services greet me with "Go away, you're not allowed to listen to us from your countrty" I'm happy to give Grooveshark money.

Grooveshark is an eloquent discovery tool. Music discovery is always a challenge for music lovers.

Example just now made me want to comment here - very simple.

Friend posted a YouTube video with a song on Facebook. I went to Grooveshark and listened to the song, and others by the artists - not song samples, but the whole songs, which I made a little playlist with. Hooked on the band discovery, I just went and bought two albums.

I honestly believe that Grooveshark will never get love from the major record labels. They just pissed them off and the record industry likes to play hardball.

I gave them a tech suggestion a few weeks ago for their mobile apps. Obviously the apple app store won't allow them and neither will Google Play. Their obvious route in this situation should be to leverage HTML5 Localstorage. (this is with respect to storing songs for offline listening..) They haven't gotten around to it yet but I hope they do sometime soon.

I have an rDio subscription but I love Grooveshark because I can always find every song there. rDio doesn't have deals with every label around the world so if I want to listen to something slightly offbeat - chances are that only Grooveshark will have it.

I am not familiar with the music app scene, but whenever I am working I have grooveshark open, I can find any song, especially the latest ones. I also don't have facebook so I can't use those apps, the whole experience is very seamless. At the gym I use the Pandora app but if I had access to grooveshark, I would definitely replace Pandora with it. Maybe to do what it takes to get this level of seamlesness is what is causing a backlash from record labels. I also love not being forced into social sharing.

I've loved (and used) Grooveshark since the early days. I have most of my music saved to my account and go to the site daily to play music. What's always irked me though was that it wasn't a subscription service. I would gladly pay for an app of its caliber monthly without a thought.

I pay for the pro version now (I believe it's at 25/year) and it's just too low. I imagine revenue from a (monthly) subscription service would give them a lot of cash for handling labels. In turn, I think they'd garner the respect/legitimacy needed to get them in the app store.

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