Grooveshark
 

Grooveshark is the latest music-sharing/music-streaming thingie on the Internets and if you listen to music you should invest some time in it. It's very easy to get into and start using, just search for an artist you like, and bam, in seconds you're listening.

Right now it's 100% free on the desktop and it contains a large amount of stuff. Not everything; there are some random acts that don't want to be a part of it, but there's plenty there.

They make some money on the mobile accounts, which are $3/month, still the best deal going. So if you have a smartphone, you can listen to all the songs you like for that price. Pretty awesome deal.

If something is not on there you can upload it, which is how they have gotten all their music. That means that, at this time, there are a lot of errors on the site, because it's basically listener-created and they haven't taken the time to clean up mistakes and errors yet.

They have made deals with labels and I think the whole thing is roughly legal.

The only downside is that it's in Flash and doesn't have the greatest interface in the world.

Sounds like LaLa, which Apple bought and discontinued. Quasi-legal streaming "communities" are the new thing.

Hmm.. I wonder how it compares to Pandora? I may try it out. I found Pandora moderately useful; I had to kick last.fm to the curb.

Grooveshark is a great music-sharing/music-streaming thingie.

Plus there are 'ways', on jailbraek'd iphones that is, to navigate in /var/temp.mp3 and retrieve the played songs one at a time and move them into itunes folder. Then you can have the songs for ever. you know, to replace a song you onced purchased but now the cd is scratched....