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Grooveshark

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{{Infobox Website | name = Grooveshark | logo = File:Grooveshark logo.png | caption = Grooveshark logo | url = grooveshark.com | commercial = Previously; now freemium | type = Music, Search, & Community | registration = Optional | owner = Escape Media Group Inc. | author = Sam Tarantino, Josh Greenberg, Andres Barreto | launch date = 2007 | current status = Active | slogan = | language = Catalan, Danish, German, English, Spanish, Basque, French, Italian, Korean, Lithuanian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Finnish, Swedish, Turkish, Czech, Bulgarian, Hindi, Punjabi, Russian, Chinese | alexa = Increase 575 (October 2011)[1] 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 for a charge that can be played immediately or added to a playlist.[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 the 9th Of May 2011, the Grooveshark team did a countdown to 35,000,000 registered users. It was live streamed on Ustream.tv.[3]

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 "sadface" icon.[4] 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.

Another 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 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.[5] Grooveshark's 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, however, concerns have been raised (see legal issues) over the legality of this content with regard to copyright infringement. All content on the service is user-sourced.[6]

Subscription service

Grooveshark offers two subscription services. One called Grooveshark Plus for a monthly fee of $6.00 USD, or $60 USD for one year, up from $3.00 USD and $30 USD respectively since December 1 2010, and $9/month ($90/year) for Grooveshark Anywhere.[7] Plus/Anywhere services provides additional functions, most notable is the removal of banner ads along the right side of the Grooveshark applet. The Plus/Anywhere service also includes smaller enhancements, such as the ability to use fullscreen mode, crossfading of songs, interface personalization, scrobble songs to last.fm pages, Power Hour Mode, and more. Anywhere services offer access to the Grooveshark mobile application on Palm, Nokia, and BlackBerry devices. As of April 1, 2011 the Grooveshark app has been pulled, without their permission, from the Android Market as confirmed by Grooveshark employee Gene (Title:Community Developer). Before December 1 2010, the support for mobile devices was available to Grooveshark VIP 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 and Universal Music Group.(see legal issues below). However, the Grooveshark app is available for jailbroken iPhones via Cydia, and on Android devices via download from their homepage. A Grooveshark application written for Adobe AIR, called Grooveshark Desktop, is also available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, though only premium users are allowed to use the official desktop application.

History

File:Grooveshark Logo.svg
The main Grooveshark Logo

Grooveshark is a service of Escape Media Group Inc (EMG), a Gainesville, FL company.[8] EMG was founded in March 2006 by three University of Florida undergrad students.[9] 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",[10] and had the idea to apply that to digital music.[11]

Grooveshark launched in private beta in early 2007, and was initially a paid music download service.[12] The music was sourced from their proprietary P2P network, facilitated by a downloadable client application.[13] 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.[14]

As of 2008, 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.[15]

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.[16]

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.[17]

As of March 2011, EMG employed around 80[18] people, many of whom were students of the nearby University of Florida,[19] and had secured just under $1 million in seed funding in 2009.[20]

On March 23, 2011, Grooveshark announced a partnership with Pushbutton, an interactive design agency to bring Grooveshark apps to different platforms including Microsoft Mediaroom.

Operating in similar fashion to other online services like YouTube and Vimeo, Grooveshark requires users to indemnify Escape Media Group for any losses, liabilities, damages, costs or expenses arising from any breach of the Terms of Service or any allegation that user uploaded content violates intellectual property rights.[21] Users have complained about the unbalanced indemnification protections found in Grooveshark's EULA.[22] 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.[23] 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.[24] This changed on May 8, 2009[25] EMI filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Grooveshark,[26] which was dropped on October 13, 2009 and replaced with a licensing deal.[27]

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.[28] 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.[29] Grooveshark CEO Sam Tarantino maintains the company strictly follows the Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown procedures, usually removing content within a 24-hour period, but that Grooveshark never received a notice from UMG to take down content.[30]

In March 2010, Pink Floyd sued EMI, claiming that it has no right to sell their songs except as part of full albums[31] because it reduced the albums' artistic integrity.[32] Pink Floyd won against EMI, preventing the band's long-time record label from selling individual songs online,[33][34] which prompted the band's removal from Grooveshark.

See also

References

  1. ^ "Grooveshark.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2011-10-23.
  2. ^ "On-Demand Digital Music Service Grooveshark Selects Juniper Networks EX Series Switching Platforms to Build Scalable Cloud-Based Infrastructure and Improve User Experience", "Yahoo! Finance", 14 June 2010. Retrieved on 08-11-10.
  3. ^ "Musicians Find Fans At Grooveshark Artists". Retrieved 2009-04-23.
  4. ^ "Howard Clark Shownotes". Retrieved 2009-04-27.
  5. ^ "Grooveshark Interface Receives an HTML5 Boost!". Retrieved 2010-12-17.
  6. ^ "Widgets and Music Uploads". Retrieved 2009-04-23.
  7. ^ Grooveshark • The Final Countdown: VIP Changes
  8. ^ "Escape Media Group". Retrieved 2009-04-23.
  9. ^ "UF Startup Opportunity: Grooveshark" (PDF). Retrieved 2009-04-23.[dead link‍]
  10. ^ "Google Maps: Hear Again CD's/DVD's". Retrieved 2010-02-27.
  11. ^ "Grooveshark Brings Legal Music Sharing to Gators and the world" (PDF). Retrieved 2009-04-23.
  12. ^ "Grooveshark Offers P2P Music Downloads But is illegal?". Retrieved 2009-04-23.
  13. ^ "The Renaissance Of File Sharing". Forbes. 2008-08-11. Retrieved 2009-04-23.
  14. ^ "Get Your Grooveshark On New P2P Service". Retrieved 2009-04-23.
  15. ^ Grooveshark Launches Web Media Player
  16. ^ Grooveshark Has a New Look, But It's Still Streaming Unlicensed Content: Tech News and Analysis «
  17. ^ Hacker News | Hi, I'm one of the developers. You are correct. We have a PHP backend, actually
  18. ^ "Grooveshark -- About". Retrieved 2011-04-07.
  19. ^ "Management: Second Opinions". Retrieved 2009-04-23.
  20. ^ "Tradevibes Grooveshark Profile". Retrieved 2009-04-23.
  21. ^ "Grooveshark Terms of Service". Retrieved 2011-02-04.
  22. ^ "Buzz Out Loud Lounge: Grooveshark....I'm not too convinced". Retrieved 2009-04-23.
  23. ^ "Grooveshark DMCA". Retrieved 2009-04-23.
  24. ^ Healey, Jon (2007-10-15). "Looking for Napster 2.0". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2009-04-23.
  25. ^ "Another Music Start-Up Sued: EMI Takes Grooveshark to Court". Retrieved 2009-06-19.
  26. ^ "EMI Sues Streaming Music Service Grooveshark". Retrieved 2009-06-19.
  27. ^ "EMI Drops Suit Against Grooveshark Music Service, Licenses It Instead". Retrieved 2009-10-16.
  28. ^ "UMG v. Grooveshark" (PDF). Retrieved 2011-10-11.
  29. ^ "Apple Bows to Label Pressure, Yanks Grooveshark From App Store". Retrieved 2011-10-11.
  30. ^ "Grooveshark CEO Rails Against UMG-Forced App Takedown". Retrieved 2011-10-11.
  31. ^ "Pink Floyd sue EMI over download royalties". Retrieved 2011-10-11.
  32. ^ "Pink Floyd wins EMI court case". Retrieved 2011-10-11.
  33. ^ ""Pink Floyd wins lawsuit with EMI over downloads". Retrieved 2011-10-11.
  34. ^ "Pink Floyd wins UK court battle with EMI label". Retrieved 2011-10-11.

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