Lately, it feels like you can’t turn around without hearing about another streaming music app for the iPhone, and today’s no exception. Grooveshark, the streaming repository of user-submitted music, has finally made it through the gauntlet known as Apple’s App Store submission process and is available for the iPhone.
The release comes on the heels of several other streaming music apps’ admission to the App Store and offers a cheap, though sometimes catalog-light, alternative to other services.
Late last month, MOG finally came to the iPhone, offering streaming music from a collection of over 8 million songs for $10 a month. Rdio soon followed suit, offering a similar plan and feature set, also for $10 a month for mobile access. We’ve even heard multiple rumors about both Apple and Google getting into the cloud-based music game, but they’ve come with little in the way of details.
Grooveshark had previously seen its app rejected by Apple and had done an end-around, offering a version of the app for jailbroken iPhones in the Cydia app directory.
Grooveshark comes onto the scene with a 30-day free trial of its app, which is free to download, and a much lighter pricetag of just $3 a month after the first month. As a peer-to-peer style service, Grooveshark’s catalog is theoretically infinite and can, at times, contain some rare musical gems. At the same time, you might be hard-strapped to find some basics. As Matt Rosoff, a writer for CNET and a fellow Pink Floyd fan, points out “there are occasional gaps: Only one song from Pink Floyd’s ‘Animals’ album showed up”.
Like other services, Grooveshark also allows users to download songs for times when 3G is not available – a feature we were really fond of when we took a look at MOG – but doesn’t currently support background operation. Thankfully, multitasking is one of the slick updates the company is working on for the next version.
The app’s functionality is similar to other services, though MOG remains our favorite to date. The search feature could use a little help with sorting by either artist, album or song name, but for the price, it’s pretty hard to beat. $10 a month feels like an actual bill, whereas $3, though not a huge difference, feels like something that could go entirely unnoticed every month – especially for the constant stream of music wherever you go.
