| URL | grooveshark.com |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | Previously; now freemium |
| Type of site | Music, Search, & Community |
| Registration | Optional |
| Available language(s) | 30 languages |
| Owner | Escape Media Group Inc. |
| Created by | Sam Tarantino, Josh Greenberg, Andres Barreto |
| Launched | 2007 |
| Alexa rank | 578 (November 2011[update])[1] |
| Current status | Active |
Grooveshark is an international online music search engine, music streaming service and music recommendation web software application, allowing users to search for, stream, and upload music that can be played immediately or added to a playlist. An optional paid subscription provides additional functionality and removes advertisements from the user interface.[2]
Grooveshark streams 100 to 110 million songs per month. In April 2009, its audience grew at a rate of 2–3% per day. On May 9, 2011, the Grooveshark team did a countdown to 35,000,000 registered users. It was live streamed on Ustream.tv.[3]
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Grooveshark is a rich Internet application that was first written in ActionScript using the Adobe Flex framework that ran in Adobe Flash. In December 2010, Grooveshark introduced a redesign of the site that features an interface rewritten to use HTML5. The actual music player however, still uses Adobe Flash.[4] Grooveshark's design implements various sliding panels to categorize and display lists of information. A right-aligned black modal window also slides in to display more information for songs, playlists, and users. Grooveshark also lets users upload music to their online music library through a Java Web Start application. The upload program scans folders specified for MP3s, uploading and adding them to the user's online library on the service. The ID3 information of the uploaded song is linked to the user and the file is uploaded to Grooveshark which allows on-demand music playback. All content on the service is user-sourced.[5][6]
Grooveshark’s catalog is the most extensive of any online music streaming service with users streaming over 1 billion sound files per month, over 15 million songs and 35 million users. Users can search and find music by song, artist, album, browsing friends’ recent activity, and even through other users’ playlists.
Grooveshark allows users to create and edit an unlimited amount of Playlists. Registered users can save playlists to an account, subscribe to other users’ Playlists and easily share Playlists through e-mail, social media, StumbleUpon, Reddit or an embeddable widget.
One feature of Grooveshark is its Radio Stations, much like Pandora’s site. Users can listen to Genre Radio Stations, stations that are based around a particular genre, or they can populate their own station by music that they add to their list of Current Songs. After a user has added songs and turned on the Radio Station feature, the site will start a continuous stream of similar music. The stations have a rating feature, where a user can select a “happy” face icon for a song that they like, or a “sad” face icon for songs that they don’t like.
Grooveshark features a “Community” section, where users can view the activity of friends by “following” them through clicking a “heart” icon. Social media is featured heavily on Grooveshark, and users can easily connect their accounts for fast music sharing between sites, or quickly find friends on Grooveshark by connecting other social media accounts.
Standard Grooveshark accounts are and will always be free,[7] but Grooveshark offers two subscription services that give users increased features, no banner ads and playability on mobile devices.
Grooveshark is a service of Escape Media Group Inc (EMG), a Gainesville, FL company.[11] EMG was founded in March 2006 by three University of Florida undergrad students.[12] Sam Tarantino, a "down-on-his-luck economics major", and now CEO of Grooveshark, was on his way to donate plasma when he passed a record store with a sign that said "buy/sell/trade CDs",[13] and had the idea to apply that to digital music.[14]
Grooveshark launched in private beta in early 2007, and was initially a paid music download service.[15] The music was sourced from their proprietary P2P network, facilitated by a downloadable client application.[16] Grooveshark offered a unique purchase model whereby upon purchase, the person who uploaded the transacted song was paid a portion of the total cost of the song. Grooveshark positioned itself as a legal competitor to other popular P2P networks like LimeWire.[17]
As of 2008[update], EMG has discontinued their paid download service and has repositioned itself as an online music jukebox, similar in functionality to services like Pandora and Last.fm.[18]
On October 27, 2009, Grooveshark introduced a new user interface, which provides a look similar to iTunes. Also, users were now able to skip forward and backward to any point in a song.[19]
In 2010, Grooveshark was noted by Time Magazine as one of the 50 best websites of 2010.
On December 2, 2010, Grooveshark released their HTML and JavaScript version of the site as the default user interface. The site uses an invisible Adobe Flash component to stream music and work around cross-domain restrictions.[20]
As of March 2011[update], EMG employed around 80[21] people, many of whom were students of the nearby University of Florida,[22] and had secured just under $1 million in seed funding in 2009.[23]
On March 23, 2011, Grooveshark announced a partnership with Pushbutton, an interactive design agency to bring Grooveshark apps to different platforms including Microsoft Mediaroom.
On April 18, 2011, Grooveshark’s Sr. VP of External Affairs Paul Geller released an open letter to the music industry regarding Grooveshark’s legality in an effort to explain how Grooveshark is legal, even though it is not completely licensed.
There is a distinction between legal and licensed. Laws come from Congress. Licenses come from businesses. Grooveshark is completely legal because we comply with the laws passed by Congress, but we are not licensed by every label (yet). We are a technology company, and we operate within the boundaries of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA). Some would have you believe that those of us who use the DMCA to innovate are inherently infringers and that claiming Safe Harbor under the DMCA is as good as admitting guilt. Not so.[24]—Paul Geller
For all the content on Grooveshark that is user-generated, the site relies on users to follow guidelines when uploading. Grooveshark’s Terms of Service outlines that no user content shall be “illegal, obscene, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, infringing of intellectual property rights, or otherwise injurious to third parties or objectionable.” [25] It is Grooveshark’s policy to honor all takedown requests that comply with the requirements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and other applicable intellectual property laws.[26] In December 2010, Grooveshark launched a revamped copyright management page[27] which included a new web-based DMCA takedown tool[28] to help content owners manage material on Grooveshark and communicate when content needs to be removed.[29] Grooveshark CEO Sam Tarantino maintains the company strictly follows the Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown procedures, usually removing content expeditiously.[30]
Grooveshark has licensing deals with both independent and major record labels, publishers and PROs, including EMI[31] and Sun Records.[32][33]
Universal Music Group filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Grooveshark on January 6, 2010, alleging that Grooveshark maintained on its servers illegal copies of Universal's pre-1972 catalog.[34] UMG filed a second lawsuit against Grooveshark in November 2011 citing internal documents revealing that Grooveshark employees uploaded thousands of illegal copies of UMG-owned recordings.[35] Grooveshark responded by saying that this was a "gross mischaracterisation of information that Grooveshark itself provided to Universal."[36] A complaint from Universal Media Group to Apple is believed to be the reason behind Apple pulling the iPhone app from its store after only a few days on Aug. 16, 2010.[37]
In March 2010, Pink Floyd sued EMI, claiming that it has no right to sell their songs except as part of full albums[38] because it reduced the albums' artistic integrity.[39] Pink Floyd won against EMI, preventing the band's long-time record label from selling individual songs online,[40][41] which prompted the band's removal from Grooveshark.
On April 1, 2011, the Grooveshark app was pulled, without their consent, from the Android Market.[42]