Spotify vs Grooveshark; a personal review (the shark’s got no teeth)

By On March 24, 2011 · 13 Comments

I’m a relatively new arrival on the streaming music service scene. A year ago I had a brief fling with Grooveshark but gave it up because they made such simple but glaringly obvious fuck-ups in their user presentation stuff that I just couldn’t handle sticking around putting myself through the bad experience every time I started the app.

If anything the experience led me back to my trusty iPod as well as down a series of roads experimenting with putting my own music in cloud land servers with various software front-ends. That was okay, but I couldn’t help but feel I was being cheated somewhat because really, we’re in the 21st century, streaming music services should be so ubiquitous, cheap and satisfying they should be the equivalent of a tin of baked beans. However no, this wasn’t the case (the huge irony here being, I don’t actually like baked beans).

Without going into too much detail, it’s extremely hard to get a streaming content service off the ground not because of the technology – that’s the easy part – but because of content ownership rights. That there is a Gordian knot being pulled every which way by a large army of lawyers, marketers and management execs all hell bent on holding on to the last vestige of content control and royalty revenue from the bygone age of the last millennium. It’s a problem that will still be with us 30 years from now.

Now at the same time that me and Grooveshark were getting acquainted, friends of mine living in the The UK were raving about a similar service going by the name of Spotify. It all sounded pretty great until I found out that it was only available in The UK. I used to hate getting all these Facebook updates from people sharing all this cool stuff and I couldn’t listen to any of it. Kind of like being told you couldn’t participate in Christmas because you weren’t allowed in the house. A short time later I gave Grooveshark up and moved on to other more niche cloud based streaming music services such as SoundCloud, and Mixcloud that catered to those producers and fans in the electronic/dance scene.

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The Spotify vs Grooveshark; a personal review (the shark’s got no teeth) by Mentalechoes, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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  • http://twitter.com/3shirts 3shirts

    Actually what they say is ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’. People get this saying wrong a lot and it’s a bit of a bugbear!

    On topic, this is a good article. I have found lot of reviews about the two services but they all seem to be written with the opinion already made beforehand. Yours seems very balanced.

    Thanks

  • Anonymous

    Hi 3shirts,

    Thanks very much for visiting my blog and taking the time to comment. I’m very glad you enjoyed the post and found it worthwhile.

    You opine that a lot of reviews seem biased before the author has even started the review; well, that was exactly my experience as well, and it annoyed the hell out of me so much I had to write my own review on these two services. It was particularly annoying to me because I was looking for honest reviews from honest music lovers so I could make an honest assessment where I would spend my very hard earned cash.

    Out of curiousity, which service did you go with? And if you can spare the 5 minutes, can you give me the 25 words or less version of why you choose that particular service? I’d enjoy reading about your own personal experience.

    Cheers,

    Andy.

  • David

    Very nice review, seems like you can only find either shark or spotify lovers out there, nice to have someone neutral, i like it, it’s professional.

  • Andy

    Thanks, David. Very good of you to stop by and read the article and leave a comment. I’m happy you found it worthwhile, and enjoyed reading it.

  • Erric

    I’m not sure I understand where you present the argument of grooveshark vs. spotify..maybe a more appropriate title would be: cloud vs streaming

    • Stinky

      Maybe you should learn to use “cloud” appropriately.

  • Anonymous

    Hi Erric,

    Well technically they are both streaming services, because the content they provide to users is sent over the wire from wherever their data store is located to a users client frontend; which in the case of Spotify is an installed app, and for Grooveshark is a web browser. Although Spotify’s client also has built in functionality to play files stored locally, which is a nice feature, as it has the capacity to be an all-in-one music media player on a user’s device (PC, tablet, mobile).

    Cloud is in most cases is a generic term used by marketing to imply a service that runs out in the internet. However the term “cloud” specifically means a few different things. Firstly it’s utility storage as a service, such as Amazon’s S3; secondly it’s utility computing infrastructure that scales on demand, such as Amazon’s EC2; thirdly it’s an infrastructure that provides users with guest operating systems that are instantiated very quickly requiring little or no admin overhead to bring them up to operational readiness.

    My guess is that the cloud component you are most likely referring to is one of the services utilising cloud storage to hold incredible amounts of data objects that are uploaded, say Grooveshark music files that their users upload. But it’s entirely likely that Spotify could also use a cloud utility storage service to hold their music files. Why not? There would be many advantages in them doing so, which all fall into the same reasons utility storage is a cost effective solution to any business that has huge storage needs, including Grooveshark.

    So when you look at it, they are definitely both streaming; but they could both be classified as cloud services or neither, there is really no way to be certain unless we got a hold of their technical architecture documentation and saw how the backend was put together. Alternatively they could both be using a SaaS architecture in the form of traditional servers configured by components in a data center of their own, or hosted somewhere.

    So what makes you think one is “cloud” and the other is “streaming”?

    Thanks for stopping by,

    Andy.

  • Anonymouse

    While I have only used grooveshark (GS) I have done a fair amount of reading on spotify. As a college student, I don’t have the money to throw at paid services, so only comparing the free services: Grooveshark’s ads don’t interrupt your music, and using a chrome extension can be completely removed entirely. Also, for chrome, you can make a “desktop” version of GS which, when combined with the ad removal, is essentially their 5 dollar/month plan. For that, I’m definitely going with GS over spotify. On the larger library that all us GS users are “group hallucinating” about. In a way, it’s true. While both services have large collections, and both have some pretty unknown artists, the ability for GS users to upload their own collections allow you to get some personalized remixes and other music that’s not available on spotify. So if all you listen to is Lady GaGa and other popular artists, then it’s not a problem.  Also, when I visit a friends house, and I want to show him my latest playlist, I don’t need to download a whole application, and set it up on his computer with my information. I can simply load a web page and login. 

    I completely agree with your point that almost everything is based on subjective appeal, and so is GS vs Spotify, but in my not-paying-for-service opinion, GS easily takes the bacon.

  • Andy

    Hi Anonymouse,

    Thanks for stopping by and having a read, and leaving a comment. Always appreciated.

    However you and I are about as far apart as you can get on this topic. First you say you can’t pay the 5 bucks a month for the paid service. Seriously, it’s 5 dollars for unlimited use of the Spotify entire library, which is all uniformly encoded, and presented in a slick app that’s a joy to use. Most importantly, each play of a tune generates revenue for the artist. That means they get paid for their work, and they get to keep making more tunes, which means we as consumers get more tunes. Everybody wins. You can basically stop being CD’s for the time you’re a student and just pay the 5 bucks a month and get them on Spotify.

    GS on the other hand doesn’t pay jack-shit to artists; in fact the whole service is controversial in its legality. (Check Google for this and you’ll see what I mean). The fact that you get to use someone else’s digital library is a real grey area. Do you think this is fair for artists? I mean in an extreme example an artist makes one sale to a GS user, who puts it up on the service, and the rest of the world gets to use it for free. No wonder you have lobby groups screaming blue murder trying to get the pendulum to swing to the extreme other side of that equation, which is no sharing of anything. Spotify as I see it is really trying to walk the middle ground here and give something to both sides. 

    Okay, so you’re a poor student. I get it, because I was poor student for 5 years; I once lived only being able to eat packets noodles and basic veg, no meat for long periods of time. I know how hard it is to get by on student wages. But you know paying 5 dollars a month for an unlimited jukebox, which means you get most of the new stuff coming out, and radio streams and Spotify-casts, and whatever they think of next, is a pretty good deal. I’d call it a no-brainer, but then I use Spotify at least 40 hours a week. That might not be your usage pattern, and my value system is not yours so of course you might have a different opinion.

    Actually this whole discussion on my side can be summed up by this guy Charlie Brooker, pro journo, who wrote his own article on Spotify. He really gets across what I’m trying to say.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/06/spotify-problem-getting-people-to-pay

    On the whole app vs web UI, I’ll leave that to personal preference. I don’t mind apps; I find them in many ways a richer experience than a web site, but then you loose portability. Meh… I’d rather have the richer experience, but that’s just me. I totally understand wanting portability over having to install something.

    Happy Listening,

    A.

  • Maren

    if i hadn’t met you, i probably still wouldn’t know about spotify. exchanging music with you has been amazing. thanks for showing me the most awesome program on this planet. you rock andy!!

    Maren :)

    • Andy

      Gonna miss swapping music with you when you go home; t’s been a great couple of weeks hanging out in Spotify together :)

      You rock more! :)

  • http://twitter.com/koffein666 Kristofer Markham

    Ive done a in dept test between the two.

    Check it out:

    http://www.noyas.net/2011/11/battle-of-titans-spotify-vs-grooveshark.html

    This is only part 1 though so stay tuned for part 2.

    // Kristofer.

  • Anonymous

    I haven’t tried Spotify, and I just looked at Grooveshark.  Regardless, I just wanted to let you know this review is really shittily written. 

    You need incorporate more examples and description and fewer personal opinions.  If you do decide to include your personal opinions, don’t just say something along the lines of “just look at the proof, this service is way better than the other service,” but instead provide the proof.

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