Online music service Grooveshark lets you stream pretty much any song at any time… for free. That’s because, unlike competitors Spotify and Rdio, Grooveshark has a post-music-first, ask-for-permission-later approach.
That’s probably why the company faces lawsuits from four major US record labels… and it’s also a large part of the reason Grooveshark’s mobile apps were booted from Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store last year.
But now Grooveshark is back in Google’s store for Android apps. It’s available as a free download.
Update: As of 8/31/2012, the app is no longer available from the Play Store. You can still grab it from the Grooveshark Mobile site, or use the HTML5 web player.
If you want to stream songs on-demand, you’ll need to sign up for a Grooveshark Anywhere account for $9 per month. You can also get a 14 day or 50-play free trial to kick the tires.
Grooveshark Anywhere subscribers can also access favorites, playlists, and other data — and save songs for offline playback.
But even if you don’t pony up a penny, you can use the new Grooveshark app for Android to stream music over the internet thanks to a new radio feature. Just search for a song or artist, then tap the “Start New Station from Artist” option to start listening to music from similar artists.
It’s basically Grooveshark’s version of Pandora.
There’s no guarantee the Grooveshark won’t get sued into oblivion one of these days. But the company says it’s worked with Google to eliminate apps which let users download songs from the service illegally — and instead continues to let users stream music from artists on record labels that may not have given Grooveshark the rights to stream those songs.
No way this will survive for long, but until then i’ll sure enjoy it.