Type of site | Music |
---|---|
Owner | Escape Media Group Inc. |
Created by | Sam Tarantino Josh Greenberg Andrés Barreto |
Commercial | Yes (freemium) |
Registration | Optional |
Launched | March 30, 2006 [1] Closed on April 30, 2015 |
Current status | Available: groovesharks.org New version. |
Grooveshark was a web-based music streaming service owned and operated by Escape Media Group in the United States. [2] Users could upload digital audio files, which could then be streamed and organized in playlists. [3] The Grooveshark website had a search engine, music streaming features, and a music recommendation system. [4]
The company won a major lawsuit filed by Universal Music Group concerning use of Universal's pre-1972 recordings. Grooveshark was also sued for copyright violations by EMI Music Publishing, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group. [5] Concerns about copyrights led Apple and Facebook to remove Grooveshark's applications from the iOS App Store and Facebook Platform respectively. [6] However, Grooveshark was available in alternative app stores, such as Cydia, Google Play and BlackBerry World. [7] [8] [9] [10] It was also a default application on Ubuntu Touch. [11]
On April 30, 2015, Grooveshark abruptly shut down as part of a settlement between the service and Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group.
Grooveshark was a service of Escape Media Group Inc. (EMG), based in Gainesville, Florida, [12] with additional offices located in New York City. [13] It was founded in March 2006 by three undergraduates at the University of Florida: [14] Andrés Barreto, Josh Greenberg and Sam Tarantino [15] [16] (who became CEO). During its first two years, Grooveshark functioned as a paid downloadable music service, [17] with its content sourced from its proprietary peer-to-peer (P2P) network, which required users to install its "Sharkbyte" application. Grooveshark stated that it paid users who uploaded a transacted song a portion of the accounting costs for the song. Grooveshark positioned itself as a legal competitor to other popular P2P networks such as LimeWire, although questions about its legality arose from the beginning. [18]
Grooveshark entered beta in September 2007. [19] In the beta, users bought and sold tracks among themselves for 99 cents. [20] Around 70 cents went to the record label, 25 cents to the user selling the track, and 4 cents to Grooveshark. Grooveshark's model had been approved by various small record labels, but not by any of the major record companies. [20]
On April 15, 2008, the service launched its web service, enabling users to click and play songs on the site without having to download an application. [14] The new web service was a Flash media player called "Grooveshark Lite", [21] and added a feature for autoplaying recommended songs. [22] The service rose in popularity, with founders Greenberg and Tarantino named 2008 finalists for Bloomberg Businessweek 's list of "America's Best Young Entrepreneurs". [23]
As of 2009, Grooveshark had secured almost $1 million in seed funding. [24] Also in 2009, Grooveshark launched its artist platform called Grooveshark Artists, [25] which served as an analytics service for artists whose music was streamed on the site. [26] On October 27, 2009, Grooveshark revised its interface, which featured skipping to any point in a song, [27] left-hand navigation, customizable site themes, and drag-and-drop editing of playlists. [28] On December 2, 2010, the site's interface was rewritten for HTML5. Another update occurred in October 2011. [29]
On January 18, 2012, Grooveshark removed service in Germany, stating that it closed due to the costs of licensing. [30] On November 21, 2011, Grooveshark was a Mashable Awards 2011 Finalist in the Best Music Service or App category. [31] On December 19, 2011, Grooveshark co-founders Sam Tarantino and Josh Greenberg were listed among the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Music. [32]
On August 28, 2012, Google Play restored Grooveshark's app. [33] On September 5, 2012, Grooveshark presented its full HTML5 player, effectively nullifying Google's and Apple's decisions to make the service unavailable to mobile apps. [34] On November 12, 2013, executive Eddy Vasquez was murdered. [35] In 2013, Cydia repositories iHackStore, BigBoss Repo, c0caine, and all others brought back the Grooveshark app for the iPhone with the ability to download songs and import them directly to the music app within the Grooveshark app. [36] From July 2014, Grooveshark announced that it would accept Bitcoin as a form of payment via Stripe. [37]
On April 30, 2015, it was announced that, as part of a settlement of the copyright infringement lawsuits between the service and Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group, Grooveshark would be shut down immediately. Furthermore, the ownership of the Grooveshark service, website, and all of its associated intellectual property would be transferred to the labels. The Grooveshark website was replaced with a message announcing the closure, and pointed users towards licensed music streaming services. The move came after it was disclosed that the company could have been liable for up to $736 million in damages if it were determined that the website's infringement of copyrights was willful. [38] [39]
Shortly after the shutdown, a new Grooveshark-branded website surfaced under a different top-level domain, offering a basic MP3 search engine that claimed to use the site's previous library of music, and promising to restore much of its original functionality. Although the site's anonymous creator claimed to have had a prior "connection" to the site and promised future development, it was later found that the "new" Grooveshark was simply a re-branded version of an existing MP3 search engine. [40] [41] After the labels were granted a temporary restraining order, the clone's domain name was seized, although the site quickly re-appeared on a new domain. [42] Tools have been created for retrieving Grooveshark playlists, such as playlist.fish, Audiosplitter and StreamSquid. [43] [44] [45] [46]
On July 19, 2015, Grooveshark co-founder Josh Greenberg died in his home at the age of 28 of undetermined causes. [47] [48]
Grooveshark was a rich Internet application that originally ran in Adobe Flash. In December 2010, Grooveshark redesigned its site to provide an HTML5 interface. [49] Grooveshark displayed songs, playlists, and users. Grooveshark had a Java Web Start application that scanned user folders for MP3s, uploading and adding them to the user's online library. The ID3 information of the uploaded song was linked to the user, and the file would be uploaded to Grooveshark, which then would offer on-demand music playback. All content on the service was user-sourced. [50] In 2010 Time 's on-line supplement had listed Grooveshark among its 50 Best Websites. [51]
Grooveshark streamed over 1 billion sound files per month, contained over 15 million songs, and had 20 million users. [52] Users could search and find music by song, artist, album, browsing friends' recent activity, and even through other users' playlists. The service allowed users to create and edit playlists. Registered users could save playlists to an account, subscribe to other users' playlists, and share them through e-mail, social media, StumbleUpon, Reddit, or an embeddable widget. Users could listen to radio stations of particular genres or populate their own station via their list of songs. The site would use the song list to stream similar music, and this stream selection would update using user ratings of songs. Grooveshark featured a "Community" section, where users could view the activity of friends by "following" them. Users could also connect other social media accounts.
Users could obtain basic accounts without fees. [53] Grooveshark offered two subscription services that gave users increased features, no banner ads, and playability on mobile devices. [54] [55]
In 2013, Entertainment Weekly compared a number of music services and granted Grooveshark a "B", rating, "Users upload libraries onto cloud servers, which means fewer catalog holes. But there's only an Android app, and the Web interface can get sluggish." [56]
CEO Sam Tarantino stated that the company strictly follows the takedown procedures of the US's Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, stating that usually Grooveshark expeditiously removes content. [57] [58] However, representatives of the music labels argued that songs that are taken down due to infringement claims often reappear almost immediately. [59] Due to copyright concerns and pressure from record labels, many third party companies distanced themselves from Grooveshark. Apple pulled the Grooveshark app for iOS from App Store on August 16, 2010, shortly after its release in response to a complaint from Universal. [9] On April 1, 2011, the Grooveshark application was pulled from the Android Market. [60] In May 2012, Facebook removed Grooveshark "due to a copyright infringement complaint". [10] At the end of April 2013 Google Search started censoring the term "grooveshark" from its autocomplete feature. [61] In 2012, the British Phonographic Industry engaged Phonographic Performance Limited regarding Grooveshark's licensing, and as of November 2013, was attempting to have all United Kingdom ISPs block the website. [62]
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. [66] In July 2012, New York State Supreme Court Judge Barbara Kapnick ruled that pre-1972 recordings were covered by the "safe harbor" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act [67] [68] In April 2013, the New York State Supreme Court of Appeals reversed the decision, saying that pre-1972 licenses are not covered by the DMCA. [69]
In November 2011, Universal Music Group brought an additional lawsuit against Grooveshark for more than $15 billion. [70] UMG cited internal documents revealing that Grooveshark employees uploaded thousands of illegal copies of UMG-owned recordings. [65] Six individuals were named as personally having uploaded between 1,000 and 40,000 songs each; other employees had uploaded 43,000 songs, according to page eight of the complaint. For each of the 113,777 alleged uploadings, a penalty of $150,000 was requested by Universal, amounting to an estimated $17.1 billion. [70] [71] Grooveshark denied all the complaints, complaining there was a "gross mischaracterisation" of the documents obtained during the lawsuit's discovery phase. [71] In September 2014, the case was decided in favor of the record companies, with damages not yet determined. [72]
Another major label, EMI, had also signed a license agreement for streaming music with Grooveshark in 2009 after settling a previous copyright lawsuit. [73] However, on January 5, 2012, EMI sued Grooveshark over non-payment of royalties [74] stating in their complaint that Grooveshark failed to provide "a single accounting statement". [75] As a result, EMI dropped its licensing agreement with Grooveshark. [76] Much of EMI is now owned by Universal Music Group.
Grooveshark had licensing deals with a number of independent record labels, [77] such as Sun Records. [78] [79]
Napster was an American peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999. Audio shared on the service was typically encoded in the MP3 format. As the software became popular, the company encountered legal difficulties over copyright infringement. Napster ceased operations in 2001 after losing multiple lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002.
Michael Robertson is the founder and former CEO of MP3.com, an Internet music site. In the years following his departure from MP3.com Robertson has launched several companies, including Linspire, SIPphone, MP3tunes, and Ajax13. He is also founder of OnRad.io, a search engine for radio and DAR.fm, a website for recording audio from internet radio.
Universal Music Group N.V. is a Dutch–American multinational music corporation under Dutch law. UMG's corporate headquarters are located in Hilversum, Netherlands and its operational headquarters are located in Santa Monica, California. The biggest music company in the world, it is one of the "Big Three" record labels, along with Sony Music Group and Warner Music Group. Tencent acquired ten percent of Universal Music Group in March 2020 for €3 billion and acquired an additional ten percent stake in January 2021. Pershing Square Holdings later acquired ten percent of UMG prior to its IPO on the Euronext Amsterdam stock exchange. The company went public on September 21, 2021, at a valuation of €46 billion.
FairPlay is a family of digital rights management (DRM) technologies developed by Apple Inc. for protecting videos, books and apps and historically for music.
Music Canada is a non-profit trade organization that was founded 9 April 1963 in Toronto to represent the interests of companies that record, manufacture, produce, and distribute music in Canada. It also offers benefits to some of Canada's leading independent record labels and distributors. It was known as the Canadian Record Manufacturer's Association until 1972 and the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) until 2011.
AllOfMP3, MP3Sparks and MemphisMembers are brands of online music store that were operated by Mediaservices, Inc., a company founded in 2000 in Moscow, Russia. The stores formerly sold music encoded in standard, non-protected audio formats at a significantly lower cost than other online music stores. In 2008, the original AllOfMp3 site was replaced by a blog.
PressPlay was the name of an online music store that operated from December 2001 until March 2003. It was created as a joint venture between Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment in response to the popularity of Napster.
This is a timeline of events in the history of networked file sharing.
Internet video is digital video that is distributed over the internet. Internet video exists in several formats, the most notable being MPEG-4i AVC, AVCHD, FLV, and MP4.
The online service imeem was a social media website where users interacted with each other by streaming, uploading and sharing music and music videos. It operated from 2003 until 2009 when it was shut down after being acquired by MySpace.
Amazon Music is a music streaming platform and digital music store operated by Amazon. As of January 2020, the service had 55 million subscribers.
Playlist.com is a domain name that formerly hosted a commercial-free Internet radio service called Playlist, which had approximately 60 million users. The domain is owned by Playlist Media, which operates under the brand Playlist. As of mid-2017, the website lists only Jam Music, a streaming service and iOS app available in the United States.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a trade organization that represents the music recording industry in the United States. Its members consist of record labels and distributors that the RIAA says "create, manufacture, and/or distribute approximately 85% of all legally sold recorded music in the United States". RIAA is headquartered in Washington, D.C.
VidZone was one of the largest online music video VOD services in the world, operated by London-based company VidZone Digital Media and Sony Computer Entertainment. The online service provides free streaming of music videos from the VidZone.tv website, in addition to music distribution through a number of mobile networks worldwide. The VidZone catalogue encompasses over 1.5 million tracks, 45,000 music videos and 15,000 realtones, including full access to catalogues from the Universal Music Group, Warner Music, Sony Music and EMI.
Spotify is a Swedish audio streaming and media service provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. As of September 2024, it is one of the largest providers of music streaming services, with over 640 million monthly active users comprising 252 million paying subscribers. Spotify is listed on the New York Stock Exchange in the form of American depositary receipts.
SoundCloud is a German audio streaming service owned and operated by SoundCloud Global Limited & Co. KG. The service enables its users to upload, promote, and share audio. Founded in 2007 by Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, SoundCloud is one of the largest music streaming services in the world and is available in 190 countries and territories. The service has more than 76 million active monthly users and over 200 million audio tracks as of November 2021. SoundCloud offers both free and paid memberships on the platform, available for mobile, desktop and Xbox devices. SoundCloud has evolved from a traditional online streaming platform to an entertainment company.
Google Play Music was a music and podcast streaming service and an online music locker operated by Google as part of its Google Play line of services. The service was announced on May 10, 2011; after a six-month, invitation-only beta period, it was publicly launched on November 16, 2011, and shut down in December 2020.
Josh Greenberg was an American entrepreneur and one of the co-founders of music streaming service Grooveshark.
YouTube copyright issues relate to how the Google-owned site implements its protection methods. The systems are designed to protect the exclusivity of a given creator and owner and the rights to reproduce their work. YouTube uses automated measures such as copyright strikes, Content ID and Copyright Verification Program. These methods have been criticized for favoring companies and their use of copyright claims to limit usage of uploaded content.
Audible Magic Corporation is a Los Gatos, California-based company that provides content identification services to social networks, record labels, music publishers, television studios, and movie studios. The company also provides digital platform music management services for Internet radio, subscription music services, on-demand streaming, and fitness and gaming applications. The services help companies identify and protect copyrighted content, manage rights and monetize media.
Streaming music service Grooveshark has been under a legal assault from major record labels for quite some time now, but that won't be an impediment for Android users any longer: the official Grooveshark app is once again available in the Google Play Store. As noted by the Wall Street Journal, the return of the app comes less than two months after a judge in New York ruled against Universal's argument that the safe-harbor provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) didn't apply to recordings originating before 1972.
This morning was an update for App for Grooveshark. a great Built for BlackBerry certified app.
Com o fim do Grooveshark nas últimas semanas, o audiosplitter surgiu como uma ótima opção para quem ficou órfão: o serviço oferece a possibilidade de recuperação das playlists do Grooveshark e conta com uma vasta biblioteca (além de ter integração com o YouTube).