“This is an important victory for artists and the entire music industry,” the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said in a statement. “For too long, Grooveshark built its business without properly compensating the artists, songwriters and everyone else who makes great music possible. This settlement ends a major source of infringing activity.”
I started using GrooveShark over 6 years ago and remember wondering how GrooveShark ever stayed in business. As a user, I remember feeling like they didn't have to follow the same rules as other music streaming services like Pandora and Spotify. I remember many discussions with friends and co-workers about how they could legally be offering the service that we enjoyed. No ads and commercials, playing full albums, not limited to random stations, etc...
ExtremeTech posted an article explaining events leading up to them shutting down. With possible fines in excess of $700 million, it makes sense why they would be shutting the service down.
In hind sight, it totally makes sense now. They were bending or breaking the rules to provide such a great experience to their users at the expense of music creators. GrooveShark was totally ahead of its time 10 years ago and continued to provide a compelling service. It's really unfortunate that they are gone for good!
With the sudden nature of the Shut Down, I'm sure most GrooveShark users are in the same boat as myself. I had collected and Favorited thousands of songs and had many finely tuned playlists that are all gone and inaccessible at this point. I wish I had an opportunity to at least export a list of my collection and favorites so that I could attempt to recreate them with another legit service.
Here are a couple of the features that I will miss the most and haven't been able to find with other services. Can anyone suggest a good replacement streaming service that comes close to GrooveShark?
Music Discovery!
I was able to perform a search on the site for not only Artist and Songs, but I could also peruse the playlists of other users. By searching for Workout and looking at other people's playlists, I could find all kind of appropriate songs.
User Broadcasts
After finding GrooveShark's broadcasts, I rarely spent my online listening time doing anythign else. Emmagician's broadcast called EDM Dance Time was one of my favorites. I hope she finds somewhere else to broadcast and that she didn't lose her playlists and data completely.
You will be missed GrooveShark, but let this be a lesson to all of us that bending and breaking the rules is rarely a sustainable business model for anybody!
