Sites like Pandora don’t give users the freedom like Grooveshark to pick exactly what songs are played. Pandora instead tries to guide users on a sort of “magic carpet ride” by playing similiar songs to what a user might like. Grooveshark offers its own suggestion feature, but its not enforced.

Initially, I though the user interface was refreshing and a twist to anything else I’ve seen out there. The navigation was sort of like an iPhone navigation controller (grooveshark I believe had the idea first). You pick an option (like a cell from a tableview) on one page (whether it be an artist, genre, album or playlis) and another page would scroll from the right on top of the current page and you could move further down the hierarchy until you got to song titles. It was refreshing because you’d only have to deal with sorting out one piece of information at a time, and since searching for a song was kind of a shot in the dark, it worked. Grooveshark has recently made changes to the interface that keeps the queue intact but imitates the iTunes sidebar and main list to explore music. These changes are welcomed and make the experience easier to take advantage of playlists. In short, Grooveshark has become iTunes with an internet for a music library.