Natalia Fisher

interaction design I like: grooveshark

I discovered Grooveshark this summer when I started trying out different subscription/cloud-based music services after getting sick of syncing up music from my hard drive with my phone. I also tried out MOG and Rdio.

From the beginning, I have been very impressed by Grooveshark. They have made it an extremely intuitive “app-like” web application that can be used just as easily to listen customized recommended music (think Pandora/Last.fm Radio apps), genre-based streaming music, a single song, your own playlists, or your friend’s playlists. Not only have I started using their website and mobile app almost exclusively to listen to music, but I’ve noticed that an increasingly number of my less nerdy roommates and friends have been using it. There are definitely issues to be ironed out: allowing users to upload their own music even if Grooveshark doesn’t have an agreement with that artists’ label yet is sketchy; the search functionality often feels buggy, the “community” feed functionality is very basic right now, the horizontally scrolling playlist is sometimes difficult to interact with and “My Music” is not available in the mobile app even if you are a VIP. But none of these issues have been enough to stop me using. It is just so easy, seamless and effortless!

The one thing that I would personally like to see is taking the shared playlists a step further: if my friends are currently online listening to music, it would cool to be able to tune into their queue and listen to the same music simultaneously. Maybe you could also opt to share the permission to control the queue, both people could contribute songs. I think this could have the potential to be more fun than asynchronously listening or editing a shared playlist; it is also a nice way to unobtrusively spend time or feel close to someone without being physically in the same place and able to listen to music together.