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Let's be clear on this, I love Grooveshark. I have professed my love several times on this blog, and I've championed it to the extent that quite a few people have signed up and paid for the yearly membership [SORRY]. The promise of Grooveshark was to give me easy access to the music I love, anytime, anywhere. This has been broken lately.

Duplicates of songs and albums, incomplete listings and ID3 information. I noticed these blemishes long ago, but hey, no one's perfect, and the relationship had way more ups than downs; platform independence, access anywhere, and a shared collection of music. Its ease of use was unparalleled, and it wasn't that much of a stretch to cobble an album or playlist together.

Grooveshark has always skirted a legal grey area, but as of late, their legal woes have caught up with them. All four major record labels are suing them, and its outright blocked in Germany, last I heard. I haven't bothered reading up on whatever other troubles they're in.

And then songs started disappearing.

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Today I realised I've completely misunderstood what iCloud and iTunes Match do. It got announced at WWDC, and I, for whatever reason, assumed it was simply Cloud storage. In having a conversation with Mr. Colman on Google+ several hours ago, and the latest news that streaming has been added, the nature of what Apple pulled off dawned on me, and it's rather impressive.

I haven't downloaded music onto my PC in over a year, because I'm a happy Grooveshark subscriber, but, I know many people still do, and most likely, it's pirated music.

The basic deal with iCloud + iTunes Match:

• $25 / year for up to 25,000 songs
• Stream and download your songs
• Access your songs on up to 10 compatible (iTunes or iOS requried) devices
• 256 Kbps versions of all matched songs, regardless of their original quality

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Note: This is for Grooveshark paying members only, as far as I know.

I'd randomly posted on /r/groovesharkplaylists a week or two ago about collaborative playlists, and someone replied today, and in browsing the subreddit again, I came across this post on Grooveshark having a Video Mode...

When you have songs in your "Now playing" bar, you will see a song count on the bottom right. If you click on that you get a menu with both these options on it. The video mode displays various YouTube videos that match the current song - very cool

So yeh, I went ahead and tried it, and it does indeed work!

@juleshughan tweeted an interesting Guardian post titled In the digital era free is easy, so how do you persuade people to pay?, and it got me thinking about why I pay for some forms of digital media, and why I refuse to for others.

The article is a good read, and speaks of motivations, which is something I've been very interested in lately, but this list, or whatever the post will turn into, is a lot more, colloquial, I guess.

<time jump> I've ranted too much [yes, I'm jumping in time], so I'm going to just list my rationale / motivations—generalised—below, and if you're still interested, you can read about why it was basically World of Warcraft that got me paying for digital media. </time jump>

Note: The following rationale may likely be highly irrational to some.

The short of it

Games

• Features [the social, multiplayer aspect in 99% of cases] not accessible through pirated copies
• Ease of purchasing and the convenience of digital delivery
• Supporting Indie developers

Music

• Supporting something I'm passionate about
• It's cheap
• Convenience

Television

Good luck trying to get me to pay for television.

Movies

Can't justify it, and I'm more than doing my bit to support the movie industry by paying $20+ each week at the cinemas.

<time jump 2> Ok, I'm jumping in time again, but I realised I'd forgotten about mobile, and it feels a little different in my mind.

I would more than happily pay for an app I use regularly, but at this point in time, all my favourite, and most used apps, are free. In saying that, I do feel like, for whatever reason, I would hesitate / consider buying an app a lot more than I should, for the relatively small amount they cost. This Oatmeal comic sums it up  </time jump 2>

And now, a wordier version...

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I raved about Grooveshark six months or so ago when I first became a VIP, and well, I am not regretting that decision for a moment. In fact, there have been a few new welcome additions that I thought I might as well talk about in this long weekend that has seen me confined to my house for no other reason than laziness.

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I was forced to buy a new phone yesterday, my previous phone being an HTC Magic. I bought a Samsung Galaxy S based purely on the word of 3 different people. I didn't even know the specs on the thing. I didn't even know how it looked. Thank god then that the phone is so frakn amazing, because buyer's remorse is a bitch!

Oh, and this ain't no detailed Engadget review going through each aspect of the phone. It is purely what I've experienced over the last 1.5 days.

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A quick update on the Grooveshark mobile app for Android.

One issue that I'm [and others are] having is that some of the newer songs on my playlist are not playable on mobile, and this is apparently due to the size of files uploaded.

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I've been raving about Grooveshark to anyone that cares to listen, and I finally took the plunge today to become a VIP member. At $3/month or $30 a year, it's just dirt cheap, especially considering my penchant for blowing large amounts of money on seemingly useless things/causes, like destroying my liver!

Oh, right, I should probably mention what Grooveshark is for the uneducated. Or just let Wikipedia do that for me.

Grooveshark is an internationally-available online music search engine, music streaming service and music recommendation web software application, allowing users to search for, stream, and upload music free of charge that can be played immediately or added to a playlist.

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