Grooveshark

You may have noticed this site's liberal use of Grooveshark as a means of posting streaming songs to blog entries. Unlike Skreemr which seems hardly legal to use, Grooveshark is at least somewhat legitimate having somehow turned a lawsuit by EMI into a licensing agreement earlier this year. Presumably this means that artists representing EMI will be seeing a share of the revenue generated by Grooveshark's (surprisingly not annoying) ad supported model. The only problem? EMI licensed music represents only about a quarter of Grooveshark's entire user-submitted library.

This is both unsettling and a cool aspect of the EMI licensing agreement since their agreement basically just says "we know EMI music has been uploaded to your site by users illegally, but we won't sue you." Finally one of the big 4 music giants starting to understand the way this is going to work in the 21st century. The other 75% of user-uploaded copyrighted material can be removed by the copyright owner at anytime by mechanisms of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

The site is great for all kinds of things including building and saving playlists as well as "following" friends and even a Pandora-like music recommendation engine. Definitely a great place to hear a track on demand.