Grooveshark is an internationally available online music search engine, music streaming service and music recommendation web software application, allowing users to search for, stream, and upload music free of charge that can be played immediately or added to a playlist.
Grooveshark aims to help bridge the growing gaps between artists, consumers and those in between who distribute, market, and promote music.
Grooveshark streams 50 to 60 million songs per month, to more than 17,000,000 users. As of April 2009[update], its audience was growing at a rate of 2–3% per day.
Features
One of Grooveshark's most notable features is its recommendation system called "Grooveshark Radio", which finds similar songs to those in a user's playlist and queues them for playback. Similar to Pandora's "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" feedback mechanism, users of Grooveshark can tell the recommendation system whether a particular recommendation was good or not by clicking a "happyface" or "sadpanda" icon.
The main feature of Grooveshark is finding songs and playing them on demand instantly, building a queue in the process. When users are satisfied with the current list of songs in their queue, they are able to save the songs as a traditional playlist for later retrieval.
A Twitter-like social feature allows users to "follow" each other making it easier to share songs by clicking a special heart icon which adds it to the logged-in user's list of favorite users. This list can be accessed by navigating to the user's profile on the service. Like users, songs and playlists can also be added to a favorites list. Music can be shared on Grooveshark by directly linking songs to other users within Grooveshark or by posting links to other social networks like Facebook and MySpace through a "broadcast" feature, or by creating music widgets (small, embeddable music players) that can be posted on external websites.
Grooveshark is a rich Internet application, that used to be written in ActionScript using the Adobe Flex framework which runs in Adobe Flash. Its design implements various sliding panels to categorize and display lists of information, similar in style to that of the Apple iPhone. 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. Collectively, each user's uploaded library is available to any user of Grooveshark. All content on the service is user-sourced.
The website also allows users to upload music files from their hard drive to the search database, resulting in constant growth of its library. However, concerns have been raised over the legality of this content with regards to copyright infringement.
Subscription service
Grooveshark offers a subscription service called VIP for a monthly fee of $3.00 USD, or $30 USD for one year, until December 1. After 1 December the price increases to $6/month (or $60/year) for Grooveshark VIP, and $9/month ($90/year) for Grooveshark Anywhere. . VIP services provides additional functions, most notable is the removal of banner ads along the right side of the Grooveshark applet. The VIP service also includes smaller enhancements, such as the ability to use fullscreen mode, crossfading of songs, interface personalization, scrobble songs to last.fm pages, and more.
VIP services also offers access to their mobile application, currently available for Android, Palm, Nokia, and Blackberry devices. After 1 december, the support for mobile devices isn't available anymore for Grooveshark VIP users, only for Grooveshark
Anywhere users. In the past, an iPhone app was available, but Apple removed the app from the iTunes App Store, due to a lawsuit between Grooveshark LLC and Universal Music Group.
A Grooveshark application written for Adobe AIR, called Grooveshark desktop, is also available for Linux, PC, and Mac.
History
Grooveshark is a service of Escape Media Group Inc (EMG), a Gainesville, FL company. EMG was founded in March 2006 by three University of Florida undergrad students. 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", and had the idea to apply that to digital music.
Grooveshark launched in private beta in early 2007, and was initially a paid music download service. The music was sourced from their proprietary P2P network, facilitated by a downloadable client application. 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.
As of December 2007[update], EMG employed around 40 people, many of which were students of the nearby University of Florida, and had secured just under $1 million in seed funding.
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.
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.
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.
Legal issues
Operating in similar fashion to other online services like YouTube and Vimeo, Grooveshark does not indemnify their users for any unlicensed uploaded content. Users have complained about the lack of indemnification protection found in their EULA. Despite these concerns, no user to date has faced legal action from Grooveshark or third-parties.Parties in the USA claiming copyright infringement may use mechanisms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to request that their content be removed. Repeat offenders, users who have uploaded unlicensed content more than two times, have had their Grooveshark accounts suspended Grooveshark makes a Label List available of all record labels with which they have royalty agreements, though in the past major record labels were noticeably absent.This changed on May 8, 2009 EMI filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Grooveshark, which was dropped on October 13, 2009 and replaced with a licensing deal.
Universal Music Group filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Grooveshark in January 2010. This lawsuit is believed to have been the cause of Apple's pulling the Grooveshark application from iPhone in August 2010.
In March 2010, Pink Floyd sued EMI over the amount of royalties the band should receive for digital sales of their music, and as to whether tracks from their concept albums can be sold as singles. Pink Floyd won, and almost all of their tracks have been removed from Grooveshark.
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