Grow Smart Blog

 

I stumbled across a pretty good blog post last week (designer-daily) discussing the merits of listening to music while you work.  I don’t mean to prolong the debate, but I absolutely insist on listening to music when in my office.  Of course I use headphones, to avoid any unintentional jackassery that would aggravate any of my fellow workers at the Smibs office.  I find listening to music allows me to focus on the tasks in front of me; often at a quicker pace without the distractions of office white noise or the arguments of the street people outside that populate our residence in the colorful Strathcona district of Edmonton.

I try to avoid listening to my overplayed iPod and I definitely hate listening to web radios, so I started to search around for a decent online music source on the net and I happened upon a site called www.grooveshark.com.  After dicking around on the site for a few minutes, I produced a pretty comprehensive play list. Without hesitation, I can say that Grooveshark is the most useful and complete music application on the web.  I can’t say enough about the Gainesville, Florida start-up.  The website is easy to navigate and the library of music is pretty extensive.  There are a couple of cool features too, like the ability to create, save and share play lists with an online community. They have also seemingly avoided most of the controversy associated with traditional music sharing and P2P sites (aka: copywrite laws).  Grooveshark is a good example for internet start-ups about having both a solid initial premise and then properly implementing it.

There is some definite room for improvement however.  Searching can provide mixed results and I would love to see a more image based interface as opposed to the text heavy search results.  These are minor issues with what I find to be a very useful web based application.  If you like listening to music while you work, make sure to check out Grooveshark.