While the Grooveshark music streaming service continues to be of dubious legality, that hasn't stopped it from making some notable changes lately. Last month, the company unveiled a new mobile browser app that lets users of all platforms stream their music, and today Grooveshark has just unveiled a major site redesign. For starters, recommended songs and albums from a variety of genres are now front and center, with the option to play a "station" form each one click away. This isn't a surprise to see, as services like Spotify and Pandora have made station-based music discovery a major focus. While it's not clear how these recommendations are made initially, Grooveshark's blog post says that these stations and recommendations will populate based on your listening habits and music tastes — so the more you use the service, the better the recommendations should be.
Another expected addition is a more social music experience — again,just like Spotify and Rdio, Grooveshark users can now see what their friends are listening to in real-time thanks to a right-side column populated with "now playing" info. Unfortunately, some of the problems with the service still remain, particularly the issue of running into poorly-ripped tracks that have been uploaded by users. And there's still the whole murky legality of the service — ironically, Grooveshark touts new features for artists in the Artist Dashboard, which shows an artist's biggest listeners and what specific comments users are making about a particular band on Grooveshark. We'd imagine artists would just prefer to be paid for their plays, but users of the site should find the rest of these changes useful.