grooveshark

One of my favorite online streaming services, Grooveshark, has begun notifying registered users that it's going to raise the price of its VIP subscription service beginning December 1. But if you sign up for VIP service before then, you'll never pay more than $3 a month or $30 a year.

Grooveshark's online music streaming service is and will remain free. The main benefit of the VIP service is support for streaming to mobile phones, including Android, BlackBerry, some Nokia phones, and Palm; you also get access to a desktop app and other benefits. The company briefly offered … Read more

It's long-accepted wisdom in the tech world that when the porn industry adopts a technology, that technology has arrived. Sadly for all of us, that day has arrived for 3-D. No, seriously. 3-D porn. Soft-core, thank goodness. Also, how HBO is trying to Benjamin us to death, why Windows Phone 7 might turn out to be cool after all, and the RIAA trying to force FM radios into all cell phones. No, really!

It was fun while it lasted. I had wondered how Grooveshark could charge just $3 a month for unlimited on-demand music streams to your iPhone while other companies charge more than three times as much.

Turns out, it can't.

Earlier this month, the Grooveshark iPhone app appeared in Apple's App Store. On Monday, Apple pulled the app. According to Grooveshark's blog, Apple received a complaint from Universal Music Group UK.

This isn't exactly a surprise, given that Universal Music filed a lawsuit against the upstart subscription music service earlier this year. In a statement, Apple confirmed … Read more

It's been more than a year (!) since I first tested an early alpha version of the Grooveshark app for iPhone, and now the company has finally jumped through the necessary hoops to get it into the App Store.

Grooveshark's Web site has for several years offered on-demand streaming of just about any song in existence, and it remains one of my favorite destinations. The iPhone app is also free, and it gives you a 30-day free trial, after which you'll have to sign up for a VIP subscription. Still, that subscription costs only $3 a month or $… Read more

Grooveshark on Tuesday released a mobile app for Palm OS, bringing the experience of mobile on-demand music to Palm phones like the Pre, Pre Plus, and the Pixi for the first time. The Palm app joins Grooveshark Mobile versions for Android and BlackBerry (it doesn't work on the Storm), both of which were quietly released in early January.

If you're not familiar with Grooveshark, the concept is similar to Rhapsody or Spotify (which is not available in the U.S. yet): type in the name of just about any song, album, or artist, and you'll get a … Read more

My favorite free online music site, Grooveshark, relies on users to post their own recordings, then makes them available to anybody else who visits the site. This gives Grooveshark the broadest and most diverse selection of any service out there--I've found recordings on Grooveshark that are lacking even on paid services such as MOG and Rhapsody--but it puts the company in a legal gray area. Grooveshark has told me that it pays appropriate copyright fees, but content owners don't always seem to agree.

In October, Grooveshark settled a lawsuit filed by record company EMI, but now it … Read more

Muziic, the YouTube-based music application created by teenage programmer David Nelson, has been an impressive piece of work with one drawback: the desktop application only runs on Windows. Not anymore! On Christmas day, the company officially launched a Web-based version of its service, and it compares very favorably with other free online music services.

Like the Muziic desktop app and U.K.-based TubeRadio.fm, the new Muziic Web player draws its content from YouTube, and allows you to queue songs and save playlists. But it's got a couple of interesting wrinkles.

First, you can get content from Vevo … Read more

MOG offered me a free trial to its subscription-based streaming music service, MOG All Access, which launched on Tuesday. The service costs five bucks a month, and gives you unlimited on-demand streams of more than six million songs from all four major labels and plenty of indies. The site is trying to differentiate itself from competitors like Rhapsody and Napster with high-quality streams--all songs are 320kbps MP3s--and some fairly sophisticated music discovery features, like playlists posted by musicians (David Byrne got the featured spot on the day of launch) and other fans with similar tastes to yours ("Moggers like … Read more

For the last year or so, it's become clear that the economics of ad-supported streaming music services are not good for their creators or investors. As CNET's Greg Sandoval reported last week, the acquisition of streaming service Imeem by MySpace Music for pennies on the dollar is the latest bad news for the sector, following the bankruptcies of SpiralFrog and Ruckus and the similar fire sale of iLike to MySpace.

Who's left? In the U.S., we've still got LaLa, which has the blessing of the major labels and seems to be enjoying dramatically increased traffic (… Read more