Moon Playlists Fully Restored, Updated a bit and the Chinese Spotify

On the 1 May 2015 Grooveshark sadly expired after legal proceedings against them from most major record labels were successful. It was essentially a YouTube without the videos and it is a shame they also tried match Spotify by having staff illegally uploading lots of content, as, just like YouTube, it had such a wealth of "unreleased" tracks and lots of live material.

So it was not a surprise that it happened and, as The Moon used Grooveshark for a number of playlists, I had been considering different options, but then when it did happen it was very sudden. I was able to quickly replace a couple such as: A Best of the Rest of the Arctic Monkeys and An Imaginary Soundtrack from Blur as most of the tracks are on Spotify and so just a couple are embedded via Ubend, but it has taken a bit of time to eventually get everything back - check them all out in The Moon playlist section.

As there is never likely to be a Part 4 - A Best of the Rest of Lana Del Rey Part 3 has also been extended to include 4 recentish decent tracks released/leaked that you won't find on Spotify:

the funkay and fun Meet Me in the Pale Moonlight

the lovely but a bit quirky Is This Happiness?

and the short but cool Hanging Around and Wayamaya 

Plus there is a new and much-improved version of Strange Love.

Also, Slow Gin Fizzz -  a great acoustic version of Part 3's Motel 6 has been added to Sparkle Jump Queen

To restore all the playlists I had to use a number of alternatives:

BTNT Player

This turned out to be the best option for playlists that were made up of songs never officially released and live tracks. So it has been used for all but two of the Lana Del Rey playlists, Ryan Adams Re-Demolition and the James and Gorillaz live playlists.

It is a very simple and a completely free player which is very easy to embed and should work on any old device. You have to have somewhere to host your files, it can be OneDrive or, thanks to Digital Inspiration, it can also be GoogleDrive.

Soundcloud

This is the service most like Grooveshark. I did think it might be able to replace all of the Lana Del Rey playlists, but I was only able to but Part 1 and Sparkle Jump Queen together as a full playlist.

Scmplayer

I have used this for We Are the Vegetables on the Moon - a collection of early INXS and rare Micheal Hutchence songs, as they only place you can now stream them is from Ubend and this player lets you combine music from "MP3, SoundCloud, Youtube, RSS in HTML5 or Flash".

So it could well be an alternative for A Best of the Year complications in the future - if Apple gets it's way and ends the freemium streaming option.

The player is very easy to configure from the site, the only drawback is that it does not work in mobile sites, but it will work if you "request the desktop site" or change your settings to desktop. The controls do need to be zoomed into, but it does play on Android or Windows Phone.

music.163.com

Or the NetEase Cloud Music, or the Chinese Spotify, which I have used for A Best of Rilo Kiley on The Moon as sadly some of their great early tracks are not on Spotify.

It is also the best alternative to Grooveshark if you are looking for rare unreleased stuff, it does have quite a lot of the "unreleased" material from Lana Del Rey and Ryan Adams.

The big drawback is that it is all in Chinese, but Chrome does do a pretty job of translating it. There are mobile apps for all platforms that allow you to sync for offline listening, but it is not a viable replacement to premium streaming services as it does not have a comparable new music catalogue - especially of UK artists.

There are subscription charges if you want to listen to 1989 by Taylor Swift though it is only 8 Yuan per month, currently $1.25 dollars, but the vast majority of tracks are free to sync offline on your mobile and there is no advertising. So it is hard to see how it is meant to generate much income or revenue for record companies.

However, It has filled in a few gaps in the Deezer catalogue for me and ought to act as a bar to record companies picking and choosing which service they go with "exclusively" and the sound quality is excellent. In the mobile app, you can also access all of your own MP3's, though I can not figure out if you can combine synced tracks and MP3's in a single playlist. It also has the best mobile player screen of any music app I have come across - see the screenshot below:

UPDATE  it was a bit too good to be true and it is no longer possible to stream from the site in the UK.  However, It can still be an excellent MP3 player on your phone.