If you are a music lover, then you certainly know Grooveshark.
It’s an online music search engine where users can search for, stream, and upload music that can be played straight away or included in a playlist. Grooveshark serves international users and also offers music recommendation web software application. You can be a free member, or a paid one so you can benefit from additional features, and won’t see ads on your interface.
Despite its success recruiting more than 30 million registered users from all around the world, Grooveshark receives many criticism, especially from musicians. Although Grooveshark claims its service is legal as they offer a DMCA takedown procedure in place, many musicians stated that they smell something fishy about the service.
The distrust became worse when a message from one of the employees in Grooveshark was published at Digital Music News. This employee (I don’t know how valid it is though. I mean how can we tell that he/she is really working for Grooveshark?) talked about some interesting points:
- Employees are designated a certain amount of weekly uploads
- This weekly uploads are so massive, that it only leaves a small crack for registered users to upload a major label album
- Grooveshark is doing this thing without being afraid of being sued, because most artists just don’t have the money to sue for infringement
What a mess.
If this is true, then I think this is the worst tragedy in the music industry, in the last decades.
Well, Universal Music Group filed a copyright lawsuit against Grooveshark recently, and they claim to have discovered loads of emails to backup their lawsuit. The record company is trying to convince the court to shut the service down fro good.
They are at war, indeed.
Google has removed Grooveshark’s mobile app from the Android Market. Let’s see what happens next.
