Enjoy free music on the internet

There's a free alternative to the music streaming service Spotify that lets you choose from millions of tracks and thousands of artists, bands and composers – and no intrusive audio adverts. Almost all of Grooveshark's features can be used without even signing up. To get started, visit the Groove shark website. When the page loads you’ll see an empty playlist along the bottom, some radio stations in orange down the left (we’ll come to those later) and various menu options above them. For now, click in the panel that says Search for Music and type in the name of an artist you like. Grooveshark will attempt to guess the artist name – just pick it off the list with the mouse pointer.

After a moment, Grooveshark will return a list of all the tracks by our chosen artist – Bruce Springsteen – that it has found in its library. It’s not obvious quite how these are arranged but, by hovering the mouse pointer over a track, it’s possible to either play an individual track or filter the results by artist or album. Just click once with the left mouse button.

Grooveshark now displays only those tracks from the album clicked in the previous step – The Essential Bruce Springsteen. We can now play individual tracks, play them all, or as we’ve done here, highlight some of them by holding down the Ctrl key and then clicking on each track with the pointer. Then we can click the Play button above the main window to start listening to them. Grooveshark adds the tracks to the row at the bottom of the screen and starts playing track one.

Now let’s add some more tracks to the Current Songs list at the bottom. Click Home at the top of the left-hand panel and search for another artist (see Step 1). Here we’ve gone in search of tracks by The Eagles and are scrolling through the results list, picking off songs that we like. Once you’ve found a song just left-click on it and then click the Add button to add it to the end of the Current Song list.

If Grooveshark has a large library of songs by an artist, there’s a faster way to find the one you want: instead of scrolling through the results list just type the name of the track into the Search in page box at the top right and if the song’s there, it will be displayed. Here for example, we’ve searched for Neil Young and then Cortez the Killer, and added it to our Current Song list – then we can click Save to store the songs we’ve collected so far as a playlist.

Give the playlist a name and then click the Save button. Now, click the Playlists link in the left-hand panel to see the playlist in the main window. As more are added, this is where they’ll appear. To store playlists permanently you’ll need to sign up for a free account. Just click the Create an Account link at the top and fill in the form.

Grooveshark also features ‘radio stations’ organised into different genres that will play music at random. This is a great way to discover new music. Here, for instance, we’ve clicked on the Classical station in the left-hand panel and Grooveshark has added a selection of tracks by Chopin, Vivaldi and Beethoven to the Current Song list at the foot of the screen. Incidentally, hover the pointer over a track as it plays back and sharing links will pop up.

You can switch radio stations by choosing another from the list in the left-hand panel but for more choice, click the little antenna button next to the orange radio button above the Current Song list. Here we’ve changed our station from Classical to Bluegrass and having found an artist we like, clicked their name underneath the track. Grooveshark then goes off and finds other tracks by the same artist and displays them in the main window. Using radio stations like this is a good way to find new music.

Once the tracks are visible in the main window, use the various tabs to find other artists that the site rates as similar to the one you like. To take a chance click the + sign next to the artist name to add a selection of their music to the Current Song list. Alternatively, click the Fans tab and then choose a Grooveshark user’s name to see what they’ve been listening to. Click the Show songs link and then play or add any tracks you like.

To explore music that someone else is listening to clicking through the songs in their profile. If it seems like they’re finding songs you like but have never heard of, click the Follow button at the top right. Then, if you click Community in the
left-hand panel and then the Following tab in the main window you’ll see they’ve been added to the list which makes it easier to keep track of them. Again, to store details like this, create a free account using the simple form.