Why Grooveshark Fails

Grooveshark. A web-based music application, on-demand music online at no charge.
A large music database to search from, ability to upload music files, create playlists and add favorites, a radio based on musical relevance, replay, shuffle and all the rest.

So then, why does Grooveshark fail?
Excellent question. Read on.

Privacy Settings

According the the privacy settings in Grooveshark, it’s either you disclose your activity with everyone who follows you (and doesn’t follow you), or disable your activity stream from everyone on the website.
It’s not bad enough that the social system takes its base from Twitter’s ‘follow’ system, you don’t actually have the option to share your listening activity with the people -you- specifically want.

Say I register to Grooveshark using Facebook using my real name. I want to secretly listen to Lady Gaga’s new album without my friends finding that out. They can easily find me on Grooveshark if I enable my activity feed. Not good.
Only option left is to disable my activity feed, and my friends are deprived from seeing my exquisite musical taste and maybe find a cool new artist to listen to.

Grooveshark, that is a fail.

Friends?

No, I’m not talking about Ross and Rachel. I’m talking about the way Grooveshark is socially built. You have no friends on Grooveshark.You’re either a follower (a virtual groupie?) or have yourself some fans (your own virtual groupies). This might get confusing, because certain places in Grooveshark mention ‘friends’ (see ‘Privacy Settings’ page, for example).
Clearly a Twitter ‘follow’ style system, which limits your sharing abilities. Anyone can follow you, you can follow anyone. Is that really necessary?
Why would your followers be called ‘fans’? Could they be just people who are interested in your musical taste and want to see your activity? Could they be just your devious friends, trying to finally figure out if you are listening to Justin Bieber? Does that make them your fans? I think not.

What if you want to share your activity only with approved friends (which is not available, no such things as friends!), without disclosing this information with the rest of Grooveshark’s community. You’re out of luck, then.

While this might work for Twitter’s micro blogging concept, I don’t think it’s appropriate here.

Grooveshark, that is a fail.

I Want Some Data On This Meta!

The ID3 tags, user’s companion in viewing desired song and album names. This can be a painful experience if you are using Grooveshark.
The search for a complete album can be frustrating because users can upload songs to Grooveshark, and because Grooveshark doesn’t have a moderated database of music of their own.
You will encounter wrong song title, wrong album titles, wrong artists. Anything is possible when you give powah to the people, and by ‘anything’ I mean all the wrong things. And by ‘people’ I mean not the brightest bunch of Grooveshark users.

Wrong metadata poses a problem if you want to cleanly organize your music library. You just can’t do that if you are an avid music listener with hundreds of artists to add. You will eventually bump into a situation where you find an album called “Album A” with 3 songs in it, and another one called “Al bum A” with the rest of the album’s songs. This means that in your music library, you will have 2 separate albums. Annoying, isn’t it?

Grooveshark, that is a fail.

Notifications

While some people find notifications a helpful thing, others can find it annoying and inappropriate in some cases.
Grooveshark’s notifications can be definitely annoying, and here’s why:
Say I have 20 songs in my current playlist which I didn’t add to my music library. After listening to them all, I’ve finally decided they are worthy and I start adding them one after another from the bottom playlist. After about 5 songs added, a fairy fast clicker will notice that he has to wait until the notifications on the right will disappear or close them manually, to continue adding your songs. This is quite annoying, isn’t it?

You can’t disable these notifications. You could come up with new methods to add these songs to your library (such as start adding the songs from the far right instead of the left side), but why should you?

I’ll tell you why.
Because, Grooveshark, that is a fail.

Buffering…

It’s always nice to see new songs gets buffered quickly, giving you the green light on pressing play without fear of disruption and without the need to click on pause and wait a few.
In Grooveshark, this experience can be a little bit hard and confusing. I’ve noticed many songs don’t display the correct buffering information when you try to play them, and it takes about more than a minute for the website to fix itself and display the actual info. There are times where you see you have 0:00/0:05 seconds to your song, you click on play and notice that you’re playing a song for 20 seconds and it shows 0:20/0:05!

This is impossible, if you ask me. How can a song exceed its own time limit? It can’t. It goes to show that the song’s actual time is probably more than 5 seconds, or it might alarm you to choose a different song to add to your music library because this song might be messed up and incomplete (which can always be in Grooveshark, given that users can upload whatever they want).
Although this bug depends on quite a few several factors, it should be fixed.

Until then, Grooveshark, that’s another fail.

Yeah… about that.

Want to enable Crossfade feature? Maybe you are annoyed with the ads displayed on the website? Extras? Mobile?

That’s the message you get every time you click on something which is for subscribed members only.
Immediately I think about bad news when hearing stuff like that. Question is, should I think that subscribing to Grooveshark is bad news? Is this intentional? Makes you wonder…

To conclude, Grooveshark has its downsides, but I’m sure that there are many good things that can keep users happy with the service.
Yeah… about that…