Grooveshark price cut, now $5 per month

It is getting crowded in the realm of music streaming services, and services that entered in the niche early are likely facing the heat from big players that are entering the market in the past one or two years. Back when Grooveshark started it was a free service that anyone in the whole wide world could enjoy. It grew quickly and sooner rather than later restrictions were put in place to prevent access to the service's vast music database to users from select countries.

Grooveshark Plus and Anywhere were introduced back at the end of 2010. These premium services offered additional features but came at a cost. Plus set you back $6 a month or $60 a year while Anywhere cost $9 a month or $90 a year respectively. Both subscriptions offered an ad free environment, and the main difference between the two was that Anywhere subscribers got mobile access on top of all the other features that were offered.

Grooveshark a few days ago made a change to the company's subscription system. The result is a leaner slimmer system that is only offering two subscriptions instead of three that were previously offered. The free subscription remains as it has been, giving users access to music on the web and HTML mobile apps. Since it is free, it is monetized with advertisement.

Grooveshark Anywhere is the second subscription option. Its price has been reduced to $5 a month or $50 a year for unlimited access to Grooveshark and the service's native apps for Android and iOS. Anywhere users furthermore get unlimited space in their library and favorites list.

The change does not seem to affect free subscribers of the service at all, at least from what I can tell. The price cut could be a reaction on the increasing competition in the music streaming niche which seems to have intensified lately. It is likely that we will see some form of consolidation eventually in the niche.

Grooveshark on the other hand puts pressure on services such as Spotify or Rdio that charge about $10 per month for web and mobile access, more than double of what Grooveshark is now charging.

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