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Grooveshark Shuts Down

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Re: Grooveshark Shuts Down

#81

Post by vorg »

Syrup-tan wrote: post #12

The site is just an image with small text, so I've transcribed it here; --- Dear music fans, Today we are shutting down Grooveshark. We started out nearly ten years ago with the goal of helping fans share and discover music. But despite the best of intentions, we made very serious mistakes. We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service. That was wrong. We apologize. With…

First Groovy gets its development funding pulled and hosting infrastructure shut down, now 3 months later Grooveshark does the same. It's not a good year for anything named Groov* in the startup space!

Re: Grooveshark Shuts Down

#83

Post by chimeracoder »

zzalpha wrote: post #78
bmat wrote: post #74

As a native of Gainesville, FL (where Grooveshark is based), this is really sad news. Certainly they made mistakes, but what few see is how much they contributed to the tech community here. Their CTO has personally mentored many companies in the area, and they have a presence at pretty much every tech-related event. I can't think of any other company within a 100-mile radius that can fill that role now that they're g…

Well, the flipside is, let's face it, their business was pretty darn shady... not much a role model for other up-and-coming entrepreneurs. I absolutely grant you their technology was pretty cool, and the community features they built are still unreplicated anywhere. But I'd rather laud businesses who manage to combine cool technology with an ethical, sustainable business model.

> Well, the flipside is, let's face it, their business was pretty darn shady... not much a role model for other up-and-coming entrepreneurs.

I'll be frank: I don't see Grooveshark's business as inherently more shady than some of the other "act first, get permission later" startups that are lauded both in the press and on HN on a regular basis.

For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of those companies either, but I find it weird that the overall sentiment towards Gooveshark seems to be negative, when there are many other companies that blatantly and openly violate the law as well.

And furthermore, while things didn't work out for Grooveshark, it's pretty clear that Grooveshark (or at least business/products like it) have been the reason for services like Spotify and Rdio. I think it's pretty clear that we wouldn't have music streaming services if it weren't for the long line of services operating at the fringes, like TPB, Grooveshark, Napster, etc. So even if they ended up failing as a company, the gap that they sought to fill a decade ago has been mostly filled by services like Spotify and Rdio[0].

All that said, I agree with this statement:

> But I'd rather laud businesses who manage to combine cool technology with an ethical, sustainable business model.

I just don't think Grooveshark is anything close to the worst offender.

[0] Services which, I might add, have been financed by the record industry itself.

Re: Grooveshark Shuts Down

#84

Post by zzalpha »

chimeracoder wrote: post #83
zzalpha wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the flipside is, let's face it, their business was pretty darn shady... not much a role model for other up-and-coming entrepreneurs. I absolutely grant you their technology was pretty cool, and the community features they built are still unreplicated anywhere. But I'd rather laud businesses who manage to combine cool technology with an ethical, sustainable business model.

> Well, the flipside is, let's face it, their business was pretty darn shady... not much a role model for other up-and-coming entrepreneurs. I'll be frank: I don't see Grooveshark's business as inherently more shady than some of the other "act first, get permission later" startups that are lauded both in the press and on HN on a regular basis. For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of those companies either, but I find i…

Looking around here, I'm not sure what negative sentiment you're referring to, but... :)

That said, I think the answer to your puzzlement is pretty simple: every situation is different.

For example, I don't much sympathize with taxi medallion monopolies. While I understand how they evolved, today it's clear that the existing taxi business model needed to be disrupted in order to improve the consumer experience. But that disruption has happened because of companies essentially violating existing regulations on taxi services.

On the other hand, I look at a business like GS, which generated its revenues by selling subscriptions to a service that dispensed content it did not produce, without compensating artists for the privilege, and I see nothing more than free riding on the backs of people who did the work to produce that content.

Of course, there's an ironic counterpoint here: were it not for the Groovesharks of the world, it's possible demand would never have been generated that now supports legal alternatives (in the same way that I'd claim music piracy is one of the reasons the iPod was ever brought to market).

Tricky. :)

Re: Grooveshark Shuts Down

#85

Post by xtracto »

largote wrote: post #55
FooNull wrote: post #13

I'm sooooo glad I was paying a yearly fee for a VIP membership... and now I can't even get a copy of my playlists. All of those obscure songs I fell in love with are gone. I wonder if the information they turned over included my credit card billing data... Is it time to build a personal, private, self-hosted, open-source grooveshark clone?

I switched from Grooveshark VIP to Spotify Premium years ago, however I came back every once in a while to listen to remixes that were not available elsewhere from time to time. I'm sad that there's not even access to the playlists anymore.

A couple of weeks ago I discovered (In Grooveshark) an album of "Ninja Gaiden 2: The Dark Sword of Chaos" remix, which was actually really good.

The only place were this album was available was in Grooveshark. Now I'll never be able to listen to it again. That's quite sad.

Also, services like Rdio (I am a subscriber), spotify and the like don't have all the music I listen to (or is not available in my country). For example this album: http://www.rdio.com/artist/Stratovarius/album/Visions/?apSou... I cannot listen... even though I am a paying member, and the funniest thing is that I have the CD at my mom's house, were I bought it about 13 years ago.

Grooveshark (like AllOfMP3 on its time) was years light from the paying services...

Re: Grooveshark Shuts Down

#86

Post by siegecraft »

Damn. They just launched a major redesign of the site a few weeks back and (unlike most major redesigns) people didn't hate it. The loss of my remaining VIP membership is nothing compared to my sadness at losing my favorite music service, not to mention having to find a replacement. At least when Google Reader shut down I wasn't a paying customer.

Re: Grooveshark Shuts Down

#87

Post by sebastianavina »

ignoramous wrote: post #65

This makes me immensely sad as a long time user of Grooveshark. Such contrast in fortunes when you compare YouTube [0] and Grooveshark. Grooveshark, for most part, was an amazing service. They were at the forefront of UI design, brilliant at surfacing new and related content (music), excellent at quality of service (variable bit-rate buffering). You would think that with a good exit to a company like Yahoo or Amazon,…

I used grooveshark, but now streamer extension on chrome is a better option. youtube has all the music anyway

Re: Grooveshark Shuts Down

#89

Post by brownbat »

"[T]he fact that company execs specifically went and reuploaded songs that were taken down by DMCA notices is incredibly damning." -Techdirt

This and Grokster... it'll be nice when we finally get a case where someone actually has clean hands.

Let this be a lesson to anyone starting a service without an idea of how big it'll get. Do something awesome, but keep your nose clean. (PS, in case it's not obvious - sometimes they read your early emails when you go to court, especially those sarcastic and glib ones that could be misread to make you look like a jerk.)

Meanwhile, how much data on Grooveshark users did the labels just acquire? I wonder if they'll see suits against users as a waste of time, or a way to quickly extract a small settlement from each of them...

Re: Grooveshark Shuts Down

#90

Post by deeplove1234 »

This just ruined my whole entire day!!!! All I know is grooveshark been with them since I was a child!!! This is not happening can't stop crying!. I love you grooveshark you guys was amazing!!! Please come back some other way!!!! Lmao
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