I’m a big fan of free legal music online, or at least music that tries to be legal. Spotify is great but to be honest has a much more limited music library than Grooveshark. I’m always there when I can’t find what I’m looking for on Spotify and it’s ok as a music playing tool but lacks a lot of features.

Thankfully they have been hard at work behind the scenes at Grooveshark to build “Grooveshark 2.0” or a new version which should hit the mainstream soon. At the moment it is only available to paying “vip” members and I figured it was worth £2 to see what it’s like and from what I’ve seen I am pretty impressed, but take a look for yourself (more after the break):

So first things first Grooveshark has undergone a facelift and now looks a lot neater and a lot more professional but the feature that will most delight longtime users of Grooveshark is that you can now seek through songs! Yes a fantastic feature which also looks nice too. Other playback features have been improved too, being able to repeat 1/all and shuffle your current playlist.

Another screen that of of users will be used to is the “popular” tab which shows the most popular tracks being listened to on Grooveshark and this screen shows how all of the lists in Grooveshark have improved in both form an function. It is much easier to find specific artists or tracks and sort functions will help those with large lists.

Another brand new feature is Grooveshark radio which works a lot like LastFM (only sadly not quite as well) you drag a few tracks onto your playlist and then click the radio button, it will then pick some songs based loosely on what you’ve got already. In the same way LastFM lets your choose which songs you like or don’t like Grooveshark allows you to like or dislike the song, if you dislike a song it will skip to the next song. Good feature which hopefully with some effort could become one of the best features.

All in all they have improved the service no end in my eyes, Grooveshark is no longer a rough and simple tool for finding music, it’s turning into a finely tuned competitor. Hopefully they can improve it further, but for now I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got my hands on right now. If you want to get a VIP membership for yourself and play with the new Grooveshark sign up here.