Does anyone have a good sense for how hard it would be to operate a service like this in a vaguely legal way?
I understand that Grooveshark's own employees were instructed to download music and upload it to Grooveshark. If this had not been the case, or if they could not prove that this was the case, would their service be technically legal (safe harbor laws,etc)?
You'd have thought they'ed be smarter than that. They go to all this trouble to get around the DMCA and then they get busted because they told the employees to upload music, from work computers no less.
That's a really quick shutdown... there should have been some fair warning.
BTW, Sturgill Simpson was the best find I've had for new music in a long, long time. You gotta see him live if you get a chance. Little Joe, his guitarist, somehow keeps getting better and better!
I found it interesting that they omitted two very obvious alternatives (Pandora and Slacker Radio). An overt snub, or simply no point in naming two of the most well known services?
I think Pandora is US only, certainly not available in the UK. Which is a shame, because it was brilliant about 10 years ago when I was allowed to listen to it. Maybe that's one of the reasons it wasn't listed?
It's not so great these days, at least in the free version. Ads every other song, sometimes more ads than songs in a given hour, and (at least on my phone) it's a battery hog. I prefer Slacker.
Pandora is a weird service. They pay less for their music in exchange for putting restrictions on it that make it less likely to substitute for music purchases. It really is supposed to just be radio, and they do things like limit skips so that you can't just skip ahead until you get to the exact song you want to listen to. The music companies want you to still go out and buy the album if you want to do that. On the other hand, Pandora is cheaper, at $5/month versus, for example, $10/month for Spotify.
Personally, I wish I could get Pandora's selection algorithm's into Spotify and have the best of both worlds.
Same here. I've kind of dreaded this day and thought why is there no standardized 'playlist protocol' or playlist format that music services could share. This is like the 4th time I've had an old music service shut down and lost all my playlists with no migration path.
The problem may be that the m3u would contains artist name, song title, and position in the playlist, and even if you could export this, it would not be very robust to import somewhere else.
I've always noticed random songs disappearing from my collection but procrastinated doing anything about it. I wrote a script two weeks ago to download my entire collection to avoid potentially losing some really great songs. Talk about good timing. I always knew grooveshark would be temporary and possibly unreliable but I did not expect an unannounced closure with no ability to extract our collection metadata.
"As a part of a settlement agreement with the major record companies, we have agreed to cease operations immediately, wipe clean all of the record companies' copyrighted works and hand over ownership of this website, our mobile apps and intellectual property, including our patents and copyrights."
Ouch. Sounds harsh. Wonder if they had to turn over the user data as well...
If they've already lost control of the site it's unlikely they themselves were making this statement. Otherwise it is possible that it's an apology delineated by the settlement and likely written by lawyers.
The site is just an image with small text, so I've transcribed it here;
---
Dear music fans,
Today we are shutting down Grooveshark.
We started out nearly ten years ago with the goal of helping fans share and discover music. But despite the best of intentions, we made very serious mistakes. We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service.
That was wrong. We apologize.
Without reservation.
As part of the settlement agreement with the major record companies, we have agreed to cease operations immediately, wipe clean all of the record companies’ copyrighted works and hand over ownership of this website, our mobile apps and intellectual property, including our patents and copyrights.
At the time of our launch, few music services provided the experience we wanted to offer - and think you deserve. Fortunately, that’s not longer the case. There are now hundreds of fan friendly, affordable services available for you to choose from, including Spotify, Deezer, Google Play, Beats Music, Rhapsody and Rdio, among many others.
If you love music and respect the artists, songwriters and everyone else who makes great music possible, use a licensed service that compensates artists and other rights holders. You can find out more about the many great services available where you live here:
http://whymusicmatters.com/find-music.
It has been a privilege getting to know so many of you and enjoying music together. Thank you for being such passionate fans.
Yours in music,
Your friends at Grooveshark
April 30, 2015
It doens't sound like a letter the CEO would write -- it appears to be mostly reflective of the opinion/perspective of those that won the lawsuit and took over the site.
What is the difference, if you don't mind me asking? How does the use of an image instead of text make it seem like it's not actually from Grooveshark?
First Groovy gets its development funding pulled and hosting infrastructure shut down, now 3 months later Grooveshark does the same. It's not a good year for anything named Groov* in the startup space!
As part of the settlement agreement with the major record companies,
we have agreed to cease operations immediately, wipe
clean all of the record companies’ copyrighted works and
hand over ownership of this website, our mobile apps and
intellectual property, including our patents and copyrights.
Yeah Grooveshark was really getting in the way of me paying for that album ($10) and song ($1.something) I paid for in the last couple of days.
Oh and that $1 song? I bought it because I heard it on one of those videos-that-is-really-just-a-still-frame-so-they-can-share-the-music for the song. Also, what is Grooveshark again? I've heard of it, but I don't think I've ever used it.
My experiences can't be atypical, can they? Was it really a threat worth shutting down and all of the legal expenses? This just hurts me because literally in the last couple of days I watched an unlicensed copy of a song, liked it, and then bought it because I could and I wanted better quality sound. The (different) album was a similar pipeline--A link on Reddit directed me to the song (in the form of a YouTube video) and I then ended up buying the album.
I don't remember the last time I bought an album or song, but I use streaming music services all the time. Same goes for anyone I know. Admittedly anecdotal but then again so is your assertion.
(But then I'm one of the people who grew up buying music, I've got ~1,200 albums on vinyl and ~5000 on CD as a testament to my music purchasing past...)
I find that interesting because I mostly use streaming services to find music I buy. Largely because I've yet to use a streaming service that handles intermittent connectivity well enough (you'd think that my commute from a densely populated London suburb, along one of the highest density commuter routes in Europe, in to Central London would have decent mobile data coverage, wouldn't you... But you'd be sadly mistaken) to be worth using most of the time. Also because most of them are really quite horrible at picking tracks I want to listen to at any given time overall....
I couldn't imagine relying on those services for most of my listening.
Largely because I've yet to use a streaming service that handles intermittent connectivity well enough
If you have an Android phone: Google Play All Access.
You can offline content to your phone as if you own the music, but you get full access to their complete library. It's pretty brilliant, IMO.
Edit: though that doesn't help you if you're looking for a radio-like service... I tend to listen to albums at a time, and discover artists through third party services (e.g., Rate Your Music) that then drive me to sample stuff on Play. So it works well for me.
Google Play's radio feature has been amazing in my experience, and way better than Spotify's. Especially for stuff which is a little bit out of the mainstream, the selection-quality is so high that I wouldn't be surprised if they were using some of their Google suggestion-fu to generate it from what tracks users have played together in the past.
Oh yeah, my only point is offlining/intermittent connectivity and the radio features are kind of at odds with one another... but that's not unique to Google in any way.
Once I've decided I like something, I tend to want to actually own it.. Play's opaqueness when it comes to telling me what's DRMd and what isn't (may very well have changed - I haven't bothered checking in a very long time, and to be honest I don't know whether they've ever had DRMd music at all, because their lack of transparency with respect to video content and ebooks mean I never bothered even looking at their music section) has kept me away from using it at all for content.
How do you buy an album or song without it being DRM-chained to a particular service? That's my problem with music. I've settled on Spotify for this reason, but I was extremely disappointed to read that I'm probably not contributing in any meaningful way to the less-than-popular artists I listen to.
It had the exact opposite effect for me. I used Spotify for a couple of years and basically only listened to the same playlists over and over again. Only when they forced people to use Facebook to log in I stopped paying and using their service and suddenly a whole new world oppened for me. I started using SoundCloud, Jammendo and YouTube to find new music from outside of the mainstream and never looked back.
This was four years ago, in the meantime i built up my private music library mostly with Vinyl + MP3 download codes and went all the way to mimic Spotifies technical solutions and can stream my library from a Raspberry Pi at home https://jeena.net/private-music-streaming
I listen to BBC Radio 6 for new music (mainly Lauren Laverne) and the blogged 50 radio on Google Play. When I hear something I like I just add it in google Play.
Spotify didn't stop you from finding new music, your own habits/place you were in in life did that. I went through a phase of only listening to all my existing mp3s for a few years, but the last year has been an orgy of new stuff.
I wouldn't attribute it to listening/not listening to a streaming service.
Google Play slightly annoys me at times, the app is pretty horribly designed and slow at times, but spotify was blocked on a network I regularly used and I'm used to its quirks now.
I don't buy music any more. At the moment there's simply no point with a Google Play subscription. The only band I've noticed missing is Placebo's old albums.
It has no random feature, the channels they offer are either hand crafted or based on popularity. The music selection excludes many smaller, and indie, labels. The search functionalities are very limited (the metadata is too low quality).
I wanted to love Spotify, and I really gave it a try. I just couldn't keep using it, all it did for me was to make me angry. In the end it's mostly good for listening to what the major labels think you should listen.
I have personally found Spotify's Browse>Discover feature to be be useful and worthy, I've found a lot of interesting music in there.
My use case though is that I most often go on Spotify to listen to a specific album I had in mind, either I knew already or heard of it from a friend, blog, local gig, etc. But those times (20% maybe?) I feel like trying something new, I always find something good on Discover.
I wish their UI was better though. The desktop app spawns 7 SpotifyHelper processes that each eat 40mb of RAM and the whole thing feels way slow on my 10ish year laptop. The web app uses flash, and while it consumes less ram, the playback is choppy on my pc. At least the desktop app plays fine once it's started.
"If you love music and respect the artists, songwriters and everyone else who makes great music possible, use a licensed service that compensates artists and other rights holders."
It seems so easy compensate that second group that I work harder breathing each day. That first group, it seems like I could get a message to mars easier than to send them a whole dollar.
To be fair, companies such as Bandcamp are making this easier every day. If you're an artist and want to be directly paid by your fans, it is becoming easier every day. However I agree that a big part of the industry is still very opaque (including services like Spotify, unfortunately)
Can somebody verify this? I'm one who used Groove Shark to discovered music that I really like and then bought it in an effort to support the musician (thanks big music, you just took away one of your means of extracting money out of me).
I would happily wear the t-shirt if I knew that it was in fact the most direct route to actually transfer money to the musician.
I was a professional musician for 15 years. After having kids, the amount of time that I would've had to spend on the road playing and selling t shirts would've far outweighed the time I would've had to be home raising them, so I started teaching myself development in the tour bus. That was 7 years ago.
My old band is still out there, selling out Red Rocks, and any of their merch that you can buy at the show has the highest margin of anything. This is true for every band from John Mayer to the Avett Brothers to your local Dead cover band.
So help me God, buy a shirt at the show or on their website.
I'm sooooo glad I was paying a yearly fee for a VIP membership... and now I can't even get a copy of my playlists. All of those obscure songs I fell in love with are gone. I wonder if the information they turned over included my credit card billing data...
<sigh>
Is it time to build a personal, private, self-hosted, open-source grooveshark clone?
I hope playlist data wasn't part of the settlement, and that we will be able to recover it.
It would be detrimental to the artists to have some of their fans not be able to find them again, right? Perhaps record companies care less about the artists which are forgettable in the first place.
My best guess is that the playlist data (and any other relevant user data) is probably the reason the legal action even happened. What's honesty more valuable to whichever company is primarily responsible for the suit: the profits said company stands to gain now that Grooveshark is out of the way, or the behavioral user data of 10 years of internet music streaming on a front-runner service? My bet is on the later.
I've been running it for a few years now. I especially like using it with iSub on iOS, though that isn't under active development anymore (it's GPL now, too).
You could do some anonymous block-chain ledger type-service, really doubt that it would win over simply bit-torrent though, and ultimately I'm kind of biased since I really would prefer that real creators get to exercise their rights.
What is this blind obsession with "THIS NEEDS A BLOCKCHAIN!!!!!!!"? There's nothing, absolutely nothing, in a system of storing playlists which needs decentralized canonical ordering. A blockchain is literally one of the most inefficient ways of storing data imaginable, and serves no purpose here other than a buzz word.
Some people have never heard of a DHT, and think that "blockchain" is a workable primitive instead of a high-level tool. It's like immediately jumping to "let's create a table for that in Postgres" instead of first considering whether the problem could be solved with a dictionary.
Also, if people are looking for something to use as a primitive, I'd much rather they look at Freenet. :)
It's not about the canonical ordering. It's about storing the pointers to files in a way that cannot be taken down by authorities. The playlists themselves could be stored anywhere, including but not necessarily in the blockchain.
I switched from Grooveshark VIP to Spotify Premium years ago, however I came back every once in a while to listen to remixes that were not available elsewhere from time to time.
I'm sad that there's not even access to the playlists anymore.
A couple of weeks ago I discovered (In Grooveshark) an album of "Ninja Gaiden 2: The Dark Sword of Chaos" remix, which was actually really good.
The only place were this album was available was in Grooveshark. Now I'll never be able to listen to it again. That's quite sad.
Also, services like Rdio (I am a subscriber), spotify and the like don't have all the music I listen to (or is not available in my country). For example this album: http://www.rdio.com/artist/Stratovarius/album/Visions/?apSou... I cannot listen... even though I am a paying member, and the funniest thing is that I have the CD at my mom's house, were I bought it about 13 years ago.
Grooveshark (like AllOfMP3 on its time) was years light from the paying services...
There used to be HipHop [0], a simple app that scraped mp3 sites and streamed music from them. Although it was fully functional (and still appears to work on my side), there is no music discovery, only search - which is a limiting factor for this app. Previous discussion on hn [1].
I tried building an primitive version of that idea a few years ago, called Downstream [1] that scoured MP3 spider sites for URLs, then fed them into AxWMPLib (MS's drop-in media player).
It had a few ideas that were before their time, like a playlist DJ, and what a 17 year old me thought passed for a 'stylish UI' [2]
Yes. Obviously. I should have been downloading the tracks I was listening too and wring my own scripts to parse and save my playlist data with the full expectation that the service I had been paying for would be terminated without warning...
You can probably recover your playlist. (Instructions for Chrome)
On the computer you used grooveshark on: visit the website, open developer tools, open "resources tab", click on local storage->grooveshark.com. Now find the key called 'libraryXXXXXX' where the X's are numbers. Right-click it, "edit value" and copy/paste that data here: https://json-csv.com.
I just made an account on this site so I could tell you this, but you just saved the last four years of my music collection. I can't tell you how incredibly thankful I am right now.
I just made an account also only to tell yuo that I am incredibly grateful for your help, my music is really important to me and you just saved my several-year collection. THANK YOU!!!
Late, but if your library gets truncated because it is huge like mine, you can instead get it by opening the console and typing JSON.stringify(localStorage); while on grooveshark.com
Anyone know what patents they held? I wonder if music industry will leverage them to take down other sites who are acting within the law via patent suits.
I don't know enough about how the patent system works. Wikipedia says Grooveshark is a service of Escape Media Group Inc. A few results show up in Google's patent search for Escape Media Group Inc.
Although it is not a direct replacement I've been honestly impressed by the app 6 seconds. It's by the same guy who created mp3.com and his team indexed radio station playlists in real time, something Google thought impossible.
"That was wrong. We apologize"... After what, 3-4 years of mainly illegal content? Wow :) if only every crime was that easy to deal with. It's very Wall Street of them.
My dictionary defines illegal as “contrary to or forbidden by law”. If you're distributing material without permission it's still illegal even if you stick your fingers in your ears while loudly shouting “na na na I can't hear you!”
Trying to redefine the question will not make your earlier wrong answer correct. At no point has anyone questioned the legality of the actual music – the discussion has always been about whether it was legal for them to share copies.
I'm actually surprised it lasted so long. The business model was wrong from the beginning.
The thing is that in the early months/years, nothing was working as well as Grooveshark. If the website made the big record make so move, all the Grooveshark team's work was not in vein.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. The majority of my favorite playlists were filled with music I had slowly curated by favoriting songs I heard while listening to the radio stations. Even if I can still listen to my own music via youtube/vlc, the grooveshark ecosystem was a gem, and now it is gone
Eh, after a couple years with a paid GS subscription I switched to a higher quality paid service a while ago. Grooveshark's brutally bad album support, combined with the penchant for content just vanishing from my playlists, rendered the service nearly useless to me in the long run.
AFAICT, it's most unique feature was community radios... a feature I'd love to see replicated elsewhere but is, as for as I know anyway, still unduplicated.
I've personally switched to Google Play Music, mostly out of sheer convenience. Previously I used just the free service to upload my own stuff... the amount of storage they offer is pretty huge and the sync app isn't too bad.
Then I decided to give All Access a try and discovered a pretty enormous selection at a decent price (double what I was paying for my GS subscription, but with a properly curated library that doesn't disappear randomly), with full offlining support to my phone.
Overall I've been incredibly happy. I'm sure other services are as good or better but I've not found a reason, yet, to shop around so I figure I'll stick with Play for the foreseeable future.
>>As part of the settlement agreement with the major record companies, we have agreed to cease operations immediately, wipe clean all of the record companies’ copyrighted works and hand over ownership of this website, our mobile apps and intellectual property, including our patents and copyrights.
Wow - a company comprehensively crushed and defeated.
Yeah, looks like it keeps track of songs added to your collection in JSON format under the key "library<some big number>". Thanks for the heads-up.
As incontrovertibly illegal and probably unethical as this website was, I'm going to miss it. It was a great way to discover new music and I've become a fan of many artists that I found through it. There really is nothing like throwing a bunch of songs in the queue and saying "give me more music like this" using its radio service.
There's a large number of artists who's CDs I've bought because I was able to listen to their entire album on Grooveshark. Artists who's radio songs didn't come close to demonstrating their true skills. Of course, I've also passed on CDs because I was able to find out an artist only has 1 or 2 songs worth listening to. This is seriously going to hinder my discovering of new music. I didn't even know they were in court but I knew it couldn't last.
If it was on a credit card, you could try contacting the bank for a refund. I don't know exactly the rules/laws about it, but I'd think only getting 1/12th of what you paid for is pretty good cause to get most of it back.
This makes me immensely sad as a long time user of Grooveshark.
Such contrast in fortunes when you compare YouTube [0] and Grooveshark. Grooveshark, for most part, was an amazing service. They were at the forefront of UI design, brilliant at surfacing new and related content (music), excellent at quality of service (variable bit-rate buffering).
You would think that with a good exit to a company like Yahoo or Amazon, it could have really been a hit. I could easily imagine Google gobbling them up and merging it with Vevo. It isn't a dramatically different service than YouTube. But it wasn't to be.
Doesn't it make sense to open source code when you know the product is dying?
>> Doesn't it make sense to open source code when you know the product is dying?
That can depend on how much of the code base is their own. If they integrated any licensed components then they may not have the resources necessary to clean it up for release.
I really respect Sam as a CEO. Anytime I've seen him talk about the music industry, it has been fresh and his ideas could really fix it. I used grooveshark for as long as I could, but moved to Spotify about a year ago.
As much as it must suck for Sam Tarantino & co., it must also be relieving in some measure - fighting such huge labels for so long must've been incredibly stressful.
As a native of Gainesville, FL (where Grooveshark is based), this is really sad news. Certainly they made mistakes, but what few see is how much they contributed to the tech community here. Their CTO has personally mentored many companies in the area, and they have a presence at pretty much every tech-related event. I can't think of any other company within a 100-mile radius that can fill that role now that they're gone. Hopefully they'll spin off some new businesses in the area. Otherwise this will be a huge blow to Gainesville's already struggling tech and startup communities.
> Well, the flipside is, let's face it, their business was pretty darn shady... not much a role model for other up-and-coming entrepreneurs.
I'll be frank: I don't see Grooveshark's business as inherently more shady than some of the other "act first, get permission later" startups that are lauded both in the press and on HN on a regular basis.
For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of those companies either, but I find it weird that the overall sentiment towards Gooveshark seems to be negative, when there are many other companies that blatantly and openly violate the law as well.
And furthermore, while things didn't work out for Grooveshark, it's pretty clear that Grooveshark (or at least business/products like it) have been the reason for services like Spotify and Rdio. I think it's pretty clear that we wouldn't have music streaming services if it weren't for the long line of services operating at the fringes, like TPB, Grooveshark, Napster, etc. So even if they ended up failing as a company, the gap that they sought to fill a decade ago has been mostly filled by services like Spotify and Rdio[0].
All that said, I agree with this statement:
> But I'd rather laud businesses who manage to combine cool technology with an ethical, sustainable business model.
I just don't think Grooveshark is anything close to the worst offender.
[0] Services which, I might add, have been financed by the record industry itself.
Looking around here, I'm not sure what negative sentiment you're referring to, but... :)
That said, I think the answer to your puzzlement is pretty simple: every situation is different.
For example, I don't much sympathize with taxi medallion monopolies. While I understand how they evolved, today it's clear that the existing taxi business model needed to be disrupted in order to improve the consumer experience. But that disruption has happened because of companies essentially violating existing regulations on taxi services.
On the other hand, I look at a business like GS, which generated its revenues by selling subscriptions to a service that dispensed content it did not produce, without compensating artists for the privilege, and I see nothing more than free riding on the backs of people who did the work to produce that content.
Of course, there's an ironic counterpoint here: were it not for the Groovesharks of the world, it's possible demand would never have been generated that now supports legal alternatives (in the same way that I'd claim music piracy is one of the reasons the iPod was ever brought to market).
> which generated its revenues by selling subscriptions to a service that dispensed content it did not produce, without compensating artists for the privilege, and I see nothing more than free riding on the backs of people who did the work to produce that content.
Would you have a problem with it if they gave it away for free (and didn't have to worry about covering their operating costs, via a hypothetical deus ex machina?)
> today it's clear that the existing taxi business model needed to be disrupted in order to improve the consumer experience.
I very strongly disagree with this premise, though perhaps that's getting into a different debate.
> Looking around here, I'm not sure what negative sentiment you're referring to
I wasn't referring just to the comments on here, FWIW.
Would you have a problem with it if they gave it away for free (and didn't have to worry about covering their operating costs, via a deus ex machina?)
That's a good question... I honestly don't know!
I'd definitely have less of a problem with it... which is, I realize, pretty dumb as that doesn't alleviate the harm to the artists.
About the only intellectual justification I can come up with is that, as a free service, it's easier to position something like that as a way to discover artists. I think, by selling a subscription, their customers would be more likely to view their consumption as legitimate, and so wouldn't feel compelled to later turn around and buy the music they were listening to.
But again, that's my intellectualizing a position I can't honestly explain.
> I'd definitely have less of a problem with it... which is, I realize, pretty dumb as that doesn't alleviate the harm to the artists.
> About the only intellectual justification I can come up with is that, as a free service, it's easier to position something like that as a way to discover artists. I think, by selling a subscription, their customers would be more likely to view their consumption as legitimate, and so wouldn't feel compelled to later turn around and buy the music they were listening to.
Well, think of it this way: that's exactly what public libraries already do - their funding comes from tax dollars, so they don't need to turn an operating profit
Actually, public libraries are arguably worse, because tax revenues tax not just the consumers, but the artists themselves. Not only do they give artists' work away for free to consumers, but artists are actually forced to pay for others to access their work for free!
Yeah, but when it comes to libraries there's a public-good element to their activities, as they provide access to those materials for those who otherwise may not be able to afford them.
In addition, a library, as a source of physical copies, can't lend and re-lend the same content over and over. Which is why, of course, ebook lending programs at libraries are often limited to a certain number of copies... there's an attempt to apply that same restriction to digital content.
Lastly, the lending is always time-limited, unlike digital services.
> Yeah, but when it comes to libraries there's a public-good element to their activities, as they provide access to those materials for those who otherwise may not be able to afford them.
How is that any different from free services like Grooveshark, The Pirate Bay, Napster, etc.?
But.. they have access to libraries with computers... More seriously, most of the world doesn't have easy access to libraries like US or some other developed countries while they do have access to decent internet.
You might be surprised how many poor do have computer/internet access. Different regions look different, even within the U.S., and there are many different modalities of living amongst the poor.
There are laws that protect taxi companies and laws that protect music companies. For whatever reason you sympathize more with the disruption of one vs the other.
> Do you understand how compulsory licensing works? Do you really believe no indie artist has ever collected royalties on their music?
Yes, I do understand how licensing works. The RIAA collects royalties on all music, whether or not the artist is signed to one of their labels[0].
Then, the artist has to register with the RIAA (technically, SoundExchange) to get paid, and if the RIAA is in a good mood, they may decide to pay the artist. Or they may decide to keep some or all of the money they collected on behalf of the artist[1].
Again, this applies not just to artists who are signed to a major label, but to independent artists who have no association with the RIAA whatsoever.
Meanwhile, the RIAA files lawsuits on the grounds that the artists (read: the RIAA) is losing money due to filesharing, and when they receive a settlement, they pay literally none of that money to the artists they claimed were harmed, and instead spend that money on... more lawsuits[2].
> The RIAA collects royalties on all music, whether or not the artist is signed to one of their labels[0].
Whenever there's an inflammatory post like this on the Internet that implies obvious injustice, it behooves us to do a little more research. As with most such articles posted around here, there's always another side of the story. A collection of comments from Slashdot, of all places, that explains this:
First Liger, now Grooveshark. I only have a semester left but a large portion of the Gainesville I know and love has vanished pretty quickly in the last month :(
I completely agree with you. Hopefully something will come to fill the space that Grooveshark left, but Grooveshark did a lot for the tech community there. GroovesharkU, presentations, events, etc. They'll definitely be missed.
282 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadI understand that Grooveshark's own employees were instructed to download music and upload it to Grooveshark. If this had not been the case, or if they could not prove that this was the case, would their service be technically legal (safe harbor laws,etc)?
http://groovebackup.com/
I couldn't get everything back, but could get a few of my playlists at least...
BTW, Sturgill Simpson was the best find I've had for new music in a long, long time. You gotta see him live if you get a chance. Little Joe, his guitarist, somehow keeps getting better and better!
edit: I haven't gotten excited about any guitar based music in a long time, least of all country, this band is great!
I can't explain Slacker's omission though.
Hmm, I'd think if I'm paying for the service I could skip as many times as I want.
Thanks for the info!
Pandora is a weird service. They pay less for their music in exchange for putting restrictions on it that make it less likely to substitute for music purchases. It really is supposed to just be radio, and they do things like limit skips so that you can't just skip ahead until you get to the exact song you want to listen to. The music companies want you to still go out and buy the album if you want to do that. On the other hand, Pandora is cheaper, at $5/month versus, for example, $10/month for Spotify.
Personally, I wish I could get Pandora's selection algorithm's into Spotify and have the best of both worlds.
Ouch. Sounds harsh. Wonder if they had to turn over the user data as well...
---
Dear music fans,
Today we are shutting down Grooveshark.
We started out nearly ten years ago with the goal of helping fans share and discover music. But despite the best of intentions, we made very serious mistakes. We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service.
That was wrong. We apologize. Without reservation.
As part of the settlement agreement with the major record companies, we have agreed to cease operations immediately, wipe clean all of the record companies’ copyrighted works and hand over ownership of this website, our mobile apps and intellectual property, including our patents and copyrights.
At the time of our launch, few music services provided the experience we wanted to offer - and think you deserve. Fortunately, that’s not longer the case. There are now hundreds of fan friendly, affordable services available for you to choose from, including Spotify, Deezer, Google Play, Beats Music, Rhapsody and Rdio, among many others.
If you love music and respect the artists, songwriters and everyone else who makes great music possible, use a licensed service that compensates artists and other rights holders. You can find out more about the many great services available where you live here: http://whymusicmatters.com/find-music.
It has been a privilege getting to know so many of you and enjoying music together. Thank you for being such passionate fans.
Yours in music, Your friends at Grooveshark April 30, 2015
--
Source at https://denpa.moe/~syrup/grooveshark-notice.txt
I thought it was odd that they would put up an image. Even the most novice developers could have build that page in HTML.
I'm betting the wheels are already in motion.
Oh and that $1 song? I bought it because I heard it on one of those videos-that-is-really-just-a-still-frame-so-they-can-share-the-music for the song. Also, what is Grooveshark again? I've heard of it, but I don't think I've ever used it.
My experiences can't be atypical, can they? Was it really a threat worth shutting down and all of the legal expenses? This just hurts me because literally in the last couple of days I watched an unlicensed copy of a song, liked it, and then bought it because I could and I wanted better quality sound. The (different) album was a similar pipeline--A link on Reddit directed me to the song (in the form of a YouTube video) and I then ended up buying the album.
I can't be the only one.
I don't remember the last time I bought an album or song, but I use streaming music services all the time. Same goes for anyone I know. Admittedly anecdotal but then again so is your assertion.
(But then I'm one of the people who grew up buying music, I've got ~1,200 albums on vinyl and ~5000 on CD as a testament to my music purchasing past...)
I couldn't imagine relying on those services for most of my listening.
If you have an Android phone: Google Play All Access.
You can offline content to your phone as if you own the music, but you get full access to their complete library. It's pretty brilliant, IMO.
Edit: though that doesn't help you if you're looking for a radio-like service... I tend to listen to albums at a time, and discover artists through third party services (e.g., Rate Your Music) that then drive me to sample stuff on Play. So it works well for me.
It's the discovery I find annoyingly troublesome.
This was four years ago, in the meantime i built up my private music library mostly with Vinyl + MP3 download codes and went all the way to mimic Spotifies technical solutions and can stream my library from a Raspberry Pi at home https://jeena.net/private-music-streaming
Spotify didn't stop you from finding new music, your own habits/place you were in in life did that. I went through a phase of only listening to all my existing mp3s for a few years, but the last year has been an orgy of new stuff.
I wouldn't attribute it to listening/not listening to a streaming service.
Google Play slightly annoys me at times, the app is pretty horribly designed and slow at times, but spotify was blocked on a network I regularly used and I'm used to its quirks now.
I don't buy music any more. At the moment there's simply no point with a Google Play subscription. The only band I've noticed missing is Placebo's old albums.
It has no random feature, the channels they offer are either hand crafted or based on popularity. The music selection excludes many smaller, and indie, labels. The search functionalities are very limited (the metadata is too low quality).
I wanted to love Spotify, and I really gave it a try. I just couldn't keep using it, all it did for me was to make me angry. In the end it's mostly good for listening to what the major labels think you should listen.
My use case though is that I most often go on Spotify to listen to a specific album I had in mind, either I knew already or heard of it from a friend, blog, local gig, etc. But those times (20% maybe?) I feel like trying something new, I always find something good on Discover.
I wish their UI was better though. The desktop app spawns 7 SpotifyHelper processes that each eat 40mb of RAM and the whole thing feels way slow on my 10ish year laptop. The web app uses flash, and while it consumes less ram, the playback is choppy on my pc. At least the desktop app plays fine once it's started.
This is a pretty solid way to discover new music, but you do need that jumping off point to enable you to say to it 'find me stuff like this'.
It seems so easy compensate that second group that I work harder breathing each day. That first group, it seems like I could get a message to mars easier than to send them a whole dollar.
I would happily wear the t-shirt if I knew that it was in fact the most direct route to actually transfer money to the musician.
My old band is still out there, selling out Red Rocks, and any of their merch that you can buy at the show has the highest margin of anything. This is true for every band from John Mayer to the Avett Brothers to your local Dead cover band.
So help me God, buy a shirt at the show or on their website.
<sigh>
Is it time to build a personal, private, self-hosted, open-source grooveshark clone?
It would be detrimental to the artists to have some of their fans not be able to find them again, right? Perhaps record companies care less about the artists which are forgettable in the first place.
This seems like an interesting project. I've never heard about it before, though I do wish it was an open-source one...
I've been running it for a few years now. I especially like using it with iSub on iOS, though that isn't under active development anymore (it's GPL now, too).
Also, if people are looking for something to use as a primitive, I'd much rather they look at Freenet. :)
No, there is something. You could use the blockchain as a decentralized torrent tracker.
You can also have Plex organize your music, but I've only ever used the iTunes part
I'm sad that there's not even access to the playlists anymore.
The only place were this album was available was in Grooveshark. Now I'll never be able to listen to it again. That's quite sad.
Also, services like Rdio (I am a subscriber), spotify and the like don't have all the music I listen to (or is not available in my country). For example this album: http://www.rdio.com/artist/Stratovarius/album/Visions/?apSou... I cannot listen... even though I am a paying member, and the funniest thing is that I have the CD at my mom's house, were I bought it about 13 years ago.
Grooveshark (like AllOfMP3 on its time) was years light from the paying services...
Popcorn Time [1] meets Spotify?
[1] https://popcorntime.io/
[0] https://github.com/hiphopapp/hiphop [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7850613
It had a few ideas that were before their time, like a playlist DJ, and what a 17 year old me thought passed for a 'stylish UI' [2]
[1] https://github.com/MattRyder/Downstream
[2] http://screenshots.en.sftcdn.net/en/scrn/328000/328491/downs...
Services like Grooveshark are no exception.
Guess I'll know for next time.
On the computer you used grooveshark on: visit the website, open developer tools, open "resources tab", click on local storage->grooveshark.com. Now find the key called 'libraryXXXXXX' where the X's are numbers. Right-click it, "edit value" and copy/paste that data here: https://json-csv.com.
Source of instructions: http://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/34goss/meta_groovesha...
Edit to add link: https://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=pts&hl=en&q=inassign...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2015/04/17/6seconds...
The burden of proof is MUCH higher in criminal proceedings and for that reason we have "innocent until proven guilty" presumption.
Civil matters often come down to who has deeper pockets and more lawyers.
The thing is that in the early months/years, nothing was working as well as Grooveshark. If the website made the big record make so move, all the Grooveshark team's work was not in vein.
Thanks
AFAICT, it's most unique feature was community radios... a feature I'd love to see replicated elsewhere but is, as for as I know anyway, still unduplicated.
Then I decided to give All Access a try and discovered a pretty enormous selection at a decent price (double what I was paying for my GS subscription, but with a properly curated library that doesn't disappear randomly), with full offlining support to my phone.
Overall I've been incredibly happy. I'm sure other services are as good or better but I've not found a reason, yet, to shop around so I figure I'll stick with Play for the foreseeable future.
Wow - a company comprehensively crushed and defeated.
If you act quick, you can access some of your playlist data by logging in here: http://groovebackup.com/
It didn't have all of my playlists, but I was able to at least recover a small portion of my songs. Some is better than none...
However, it's also possible to get some playlists from your browsers local cache:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/h9ubz6l2uedt6mc/Screenshot%202015-...
As incontrovertibly illegal and probably unethical as this website was, I'm going to miss it. It was a great way to discover new music and I've become a fan of many artists that I found through it. There really is nothing like throwing a bunch of songs in the queue and saying "give me more music like this" using its radio service.
This is a good reminder that I should stop using my debit card online, thanks!
Such contrast in fortunes when you compare YouTube [0] and Grooveshark. Grooveshark, for most part, was an amazing service. They were at the forefront of UI design, brilliant at surfacing new and related content (music), excellent at quality of service (variable bit-rate buffering).
You would think that with a good exit to a company like Yahoo or Amazon, it could have really been a hit. I could easily imagine Google gobbling them up and merging it with Vevo. It isn't a dramatically different service than YouTube. But it wasn't to be.
Doesn't it make sense to open source code when you know the product is dying?
[0] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/23/cheaper-bandwidth-...
That can depend on how much of the code base is their own. If they integrated any licensed components then they may not have the resources necessary to clean it up for release.
http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/mrgtoqd0/new-york-southern-...
I absolutely grant you their technology was pretty cool, and the community features they built are still unreplicated anywhere.
But I'd rather laud businesses who manage to combine cool technology with an ethical, sustainable business model.
I'll be frank: I don't see Grooveshark's business as inherently more shady than some of the other "act first, get permission later" startups that are lauded both in the press and on HN on a regular basis.
For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of those companies either, but I find it weird that the overall sentiment towards Gooveshark seems to be negative, when there are many other companies that blatantly and openly violate the law as well.
And furthermore, while things didn't work out for Grooveshark, it's pretty clear that Grooveshark (or at least business/products like it) have been the reason for services like Spotify and Rdio. I think it's pretty clear that we wouldn't have music streaming services if it weren't for the long line of services operating at the fringes, like TPB, Grooveshark, Napster, etc. So even if they ended up failing as a company, the gap that they sought to fill a decade ago has been mostly filled by services like Spotify and Rdio[0].
All that said, I agree with this statement:
> But I'd rather laud businesses who manage to combine cool technology with an ethical, sustainable business model.
I just don't think Grooveshark is anything close to the worst offender.
[0] Services which, I might add, have been financed by the record industry itself.
That said, I think the answer to your puzzlement is pretty simple: every situation is different.
For example, I don't much sympathize with taxi medallion monopolies. While I understand how they evolved, today it's clear that the existing taxi business model needed to be disrupted in order to improve the consumer experience. But that disruption has happened because of companies essentially violating existing regulations on taxi services.
On the other hand, I look at a business like GS, which generated its revenues by selling subscriptions to a service that dispensed content it did not produce, without compensating artists for the privilege, and I see nothing more than free riding on the backs of people who did the work to produce that content.
Of course, there's an ironic counterpoint here: were it not for the Groovesharks of the world, it's possible demand would never have been generated that now supports legal alternatives (in the same way that I'd claim music piracy is one of the reasons the iPod was ever brought to market).
Tricky. :)
Would you have a problem with it if they gave it away for free (and didn't have to worry about covering their operating costs, via a hypothetical deus ex machina?)
> today it's clear that the existing taxi business model needed to be disrupted in order to improve the consumer experience.
I very strongly disagree with this premise, though perhaps that's getting into a different debate.
> Looking around here, I'm not sure what negative sentiment you're referring to
I wasn't referring just to the comments on here, FWIW.
That's a good question... I honestly don't know!
I'd definitely have less of a problem with it... which is, I realize, pretty dumb as that doesn't alleviate the harm to the artists.
About the only intellectual justification I can come up with is that, as a free service, it's easier to position something like that as a way to discover artists. I think, by selling a subscription, their customers would be more likely to view their consumption as legitimate, and so wouldn't feel compelled to later turn around and buy the music they were listening to.
But again, that's my intellectualizing a position I can't honestly explain.
> About the only intellectual justification I can come up with is that, as a free service, it's easier to position something like that as a way to discover artists. I think, by selling a subscription, their customers would be more likely to view their consumption as legitimate, and so wouldn't feel compelled to later turn around and buy the music they were listening to.
Well, think of it this way: that's exactly what public libraries already do - their funding comes from tax dollars, so they don't need to turn an operating profit
Actually, public libraries are arguably worse, because tax revenues tax not just the consumers, but the artists themselves. Not only do they give artists' work away for free to consumers, but artists are actually forced to pay for others to access their work for free!
In addition, a library, as a source of physical copies, can't lend and re-lend the same content over and over. Which is why, of course, ebook lending programs at libraries are often limited to a certain number of copies... there's an attempt to apply that same restriction to digital content.
Lastly, the lending is always time-limited, unlike digital services.
How is that any different from free services like Grooveshark, The Pirate Bay, Napster, etc.?
Don't mistake "big music" as being the only beneficiaries of copyright law. That's simply demagoguery.
Wow... I just...
I don't even know how to argue against that. It's demonstrably false and patently absurd.
You honestly believe no indie musician has benefited from copyright law?
Seriously?
Do you understand how compulsory licensing works? Do you really believe no indie artist has ever collected royalties on their music?
I'm honestly baffled at this point.
Yes, I do understand how licensing works. The RIAA collects royalties on all music, whether or not the artist is signed to one of their labels[0].
Then, the artist has to register with the RIAA (technically, SoundExchange) to get paid, and if the RIAA is in a good mood, they may decide to pay the artist. Or they may decide to keep some or all of the money they collected on behalf of the artist[1].
Again, this applies not just to artists who are signed to a major label, but to independent artists who have no association with the RIAA whatsoever.
Meanwhile, the RIAA files lawsuits on the grounds that the artists (read: the RIAA) is losing money due to filesharing, and when they receive a settlement, they pay literally none of that money to the artists they claimed were harmed, and instead spend that money on... more lawsuits[2].
[0] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/04/24/327063/-Is-the-RIAA...
[1] http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2014/05/08/soundex...
[2] http://consumerist.com/2008/03/17/riaa-pockets-filesharing-s...
Whenever there's an inflammatory post like this on the Internet that implies obvious injustice, it behooves us to do a little more research. As with most such articles posted around here, there's always another side of the story. A collection of comments from Slashdot, of all places, that explains this:
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/1530851/#C...