Grooveshark: The Shiznit

Yo.

Back in my TIME.com days, I developed a serious music-at-work habit that kept on going all the way through Slate. Fortunately for me, my summer workplace at Kaplan Higher Ed is also cool with employees listening to headphones during the day, so I haven’t had to spend my time here sans face-melting shredfests.

Even more fortunate for me in the wake of my busted iPod, a coworker from Slate (props to Ellen) pointed me in the direction of Grooveshark, a startup music site that lets you search for any tune you want and stream it. It has similar functionality to Pandora, as you can click on a song and get a list of related songs, but with the instant playability there’s no need to wait to see what gets played next. Not only that, but mugs with a free profile can create and save playlists, mark songs as favorites, send out URLs for individual songs, and create exportable widgets like the one I have down below in the right column. (Though I’m a little disappointed at the lack of volume control on the individual-song widget. How are you supposed to go to 11?)

I’m hella confused as to how this site is allowed to exist, but Grooveshark’s DMCA-infringement policy and the fact that all of the music is uploaded by users would seem to put the legality onus on the general webgoing public. I can imagine record companies and Apple’s iTunes division wouldn’t think this is such a big deal right now because the songs aren’t downloadable to a hard drive or music player, but once everyone’s got high-quality web access on their cell phones and less of a need for hard copies of music files, record companies better check themselves before they wreck themselves. (That reminds me to go listen to that Das EFX song, particularly for Ice Cube’s ability to rhyme “knife, ho” with “rifle”.)

But for real, Grooveshark = mad good. Give it a visit.

Also, I updated some site CSS this weekend, so I wanted to point everyone to the style chooser up top. You get your choice of red, blue, green, black, or old-school viewing.