Grooveshark Shuts Down | Hacker News Reader

Grooveshark Shuts Down

grooveshark.com

555 pointssskates270 comments

Grooveshark, I want you to know I loved you. As a user. As an ex-employee. You taught me so much. I remember my task as an intern was to turn Autoplay into something more beyond office employees voting on their favorite genres of music. I remember my first attempt at an algorithm, everyone got Coldplay as their recommended artist. I remember when we discovered Hadoop for the first time and our analysis on TBs of data took minutes instead of weeks. I remember when Ed accidentally dropped the Artist table on master, then quickly stopped the replication process before all hell broke loose. I remember when Nate made it so every image on any website I visited on my laptop showed sexually explicit material when investors came for a visit. I remember when Skyler met his (now) wife. I remember learning about advertising and meeting Less Than Jake. I remember learning not to run a Group By on mysql when it had 8 billion rows in the middle of the day during peak use. I remember going without a salary for 6 months because we had no money. And yet we persevered. You guys and girls gave me excellent real world experience at a time when I shouldn't have been trusted with a computer. Thank you for all the good times and the great culture you instilled. Hope the Atlantic gives everyone free tallboys tonight.

That sounds like a lovely time, would make a great book or movie.

Personally I'd never really even heard of it except a long time ago, let alone used it. Nothing personal. Just one music service in a dense forest of same. That said, I'm of the opinion that a public Radio station and Library should be the model for transmission and curation of works. The shutting down of Grooveshark fills me with sonder, wonder, and sorrowful nostalgia for the earlier years.

Directed by Martin Scorcese.

Produced by Grooveshark Production Company !

Funny side note, I discovered Less Than Jake on Grooveshark many years ago.

Excellent band to see live if you haven't yet :-)

Would you be ok with telling us whether best practices have been followed for storing passwords and other sensitive user information? I ask because all the information has now been turned over to people (RIAA etc?) who I don't trust my data with.

Also, you and your team made a great app; I was among the early users. When something is good you tell everyone. When something is really, really good, you don't tell people for a while. :) It was that good.

Grooveshark was always my music service of choice. It never asked me for a login before it opened its service to me (on desktop web). I felt that it never took me hostage in any way. I felt that it put its users before itself.

I will miss it.

I just want to reflect everything you said. I wouldn't be half the programmer I am now without the experience I got working at Grooveshark, and not since then have I truly felt like I was doing something that was imminently changing the world for the better.

Also I hope things are going well for you now physcab, since we haven't seen each other in a few years.

FWIW I loved grooveshark too (their play queue was the best of any of the music services I've used), but ... going without a salary for 6 months? Are you insane?

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. Without reservation.

As part of the settlement agreement with the major record companies, we have agreed to cease operations immediately, wipe clean all of the record companies’ copyrighted works and hand over ownership of this website, our mobile apps and intellectual property, including our patents and copyrights.

At the time of our launch, few music services provided the experience we wanted to offer - and think you deserve. Fortunately, that’s not longer the case. There are now hundreds of fan friendly, affordable services available for you to choose from, including Spotify, Deezer, Google Play, Beats Music, Rhapsody and Rdio, among many others.

If you love music and respect the artists, songwriters and everyone else who makes great music possible, use a licensed service that compensates artists and other rights holders. You can find out more about the many great services available where you live here: http://whymusicmatters.com/find-music.

It has been a privilege getting to know so many of you and enjoying music together. Thank you for being such passionate fans.

Yours in music, Your friends at Grooveshark April 30, 2015

Source at https://denpa.moe/~syrup/grooveshark-notice.txt

Should have been personally signed by the CEO, not "your friends at..."

It doens't sound like a letter the CEO would write -- it appears to be mostly reflective of the opinion/perspective of those that won the lawsuit and took over the site.

Yes, I'd agree especially considering that it's an image not text.

What is the difference, if you don't mind me asking? How does the use of an image instead of text make it seem like it's not actually from Grooveshark?

Wow, that's an interesting thought.

I thought it was odd that they would put up an image. Even the most novice developers could have build that page in HTML.

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!

I don't think Grooveshark counts as a startup.

Nor does the Groovy Language, but they both started up about 10 yrs ago -- perhaps it took a decade for the Groov* startup curse to manifest!

So, how long until the record companies go after others with those patents?

I'm betting the wheels are already in motion.

    As part of the settlement agreement with the major record companies, 
    we have agreed to cease operations immediately, wipe
    clean all of the record companies’ copyrighted works and
    hand over ownership of this website, our mobile apps and
    intellectual property, including our patents and copyrights.

Yeah Grooveshark was really getting in the way of me paying for that album ($10) and song ($1.something) I paid for in the last couple of days.

Oh and that $1 song? I bought it because I heard it on one of those videos-that-is-really-just-a-still-frame-so-they-can-share-the-music for the song. Also, what is Grooveshark again? I've heard of it, but I don't think I've ever used it.

My experiences can't be atypical, can they? Was it really a threat worth shutting down and all of the legal expenses? This just hurts me because literally in the last couple of days I watched an unlicensed copy of a song, liked it, and then bought it because I could and I wanted better quality sound. The (different) album was a similar pipeline--A link on Reddit directed me to the song (in the form of a YouTube video) and I then ended up buying the album.

I can't be the only one.

I definitely think you're in the minority.

I don't remember the last time I bought an album or song, but I use streaming music services all the time. Same goes for anyone I know. Admittedly anecdotal but then again so is your assertion.

An album on Tuesday, and before that on Saturday.

(But then I'm one of the people who grew up buying music, I've got ~1,200 albums on vinyl and ~5000 on CD as a testament to my music purchasing past...)

Yeah but your kind are going extinct.

Yeah - tell me about it...

I find that interesting because I mostly use streaming services to find music I buy. Largely because I've yet to use a streaming service that handles intermittent connectivity well enough (you'd think that my commute from a densely populated London suburb, along one of the highest density commuter routes in Europe, in to Central London would have decent mobile data coverage, wouldn't you... But you'd be sadly mistaken) to be worth using most of the time. Also because most of them are really quite horrible at picking tracks I want to listen to at any given time overall....

I couldn't imagine relying on those services for most of my listening.

Largely because I've yet to use a streaming service that handles intermittent connectivity well enough

If you have an Android phone: Google Play All Access.

You can offline content to your phone as if you own the music, but you get full access to their complete library. It's pretty brilliant, IMO.

Edit: though that doesn't help you if you're looking for a radio-like service... I tend to listen to albums at a time, and discover artists through third party services (e.g., Rate Your Music) that then drive me to sample stuff on Play. So it works well for me.

Google Play's radio feature has been amazing in my experience, and way better than Spotify's. Especially for stuff which is a little bit out of the mainstream, the selection-quality is so high that I wouldn't be surprised if they were using some of their Google suggestion-fu to generate it from what tracks users have played together in the past.

Oh yeah, my only point is offlining/intermittent connectivity and the radio features are kind of at odds with one another... but that's not unique to Google in any way.

Once I've decided I like something, I tend to want to actually own it.. Play's opaqueness when it comes to telling me what's DRMd and what isn't (may very well have changed - I haven't bothered checking in a very long time, and to be honest I don't know whether they've ever had DRMd music at all, because their lack of transparency with respect to video content and ebooks mean I never bothered even looking at their music section) has kept me away from using it at all for content.

It's the discovery I find annoyingly troublesome.

Actually, I take it back, All Access lets you download radio stations, too! I'll have to try that some time...

How do you buy an album or song without it being DRM-chained to a particular service? That's my problem with music. I've settled on Spotify for this reason, but I was extremely disappointed to read that I'm probably not contributing in any meaningful way to the less-than-popular artists I listen to.

Nothing I've bought on iTunes in the last...five years?...has been DRMed. It's all M4A.

Beatport is a great source of DRM-free (320kbps MP3 or WAV) music: https://www.beatport.com/

I get them all from Amazon music; it's all non-DRMed MP3. Like most online music has been for a while, tbh.

Use a legit service like spotify and discover new music. I've started listening to dozens of new artists because of it.

It had the exact opposite effect for me. I used Spotify for a couple of years and basically only listened to the same playlists over and over again. Only when they forced people to use Facebook to log in I stopped paying and using their service and suddenly a whole new world oppened for me. I started using SoundCloud, Jammendo and YouTube to find new music from outside of the mainstream and never looked back.

This was four years ago, in the meantime i built up my private music library mostly with Vinyl + MP3 download codes and went all the way to mimic Spotifies technical solutions and can stream my library from a Raspberry Pi at home https://jeena.net/private-music-streaming

I just want to point out that they don't force you to use Facebook. I use Spotify without a Facebook account without any issues.

I listen to BBC Radio 6 for new music (mainly Lauren Laverne) and the blogged 50 radio on Google Play. When I hear something I like I just add it in google Play.

Spotify didn't stop you from finding new music, your own habits/place you were in in life did that. I went through a phase of only listening to all my existing mp3s for a few years, but the last year has been an orgy of new stuff.

I wouldn't attribute it to listening/not listening to a streaming service.

Google Play slightly annoys me at times, the app is pretty horribly designed and slow at times, but spotify was blocked on a network I regularly used and I'm used to its quirks now.

I don't buy music any more. At the moment there's simply no point with a Google Play subscription. The only band I've noticed missing is Placebo's old albums.

Spotify is very bad for music discovery.

It has no random feature, the channels they offer are either hand crafted or based on popularity. The music selection excludes many smaller, and indie, labels. The search functionalities are very limited (the metadata is too low quality).

I wanted to love Spotify, and I really gave it a try. I just couldn't keep using it, all it did for me was to make me angry. In the end it's mostly good for listening to what the major labels think you should listen.

I have personally found Spotify's Browse>Discover feature to be be useful and worthy, I've found a lot of interesting music in there.

My use case though is that I most often go on Spotify to listen to a specific album I had in mind, either I knew already or heard of it from a friend, blog, local gig, etc. But those times (20% maybe?) I feel like trying something new, I always find something good on Discover.

I wish their UI was better though. The desktop app spawns 7 SpotifyHelper processes that each eat 40mb of RAM and the whole thing feels way slow on my 10ish year laptop. The web app uses flash, and while it consumes less ram, the playback is choppy on my pc. At least the desktop app plays fine once it's started.

I craft a playlist of new tracks that I like and then hit 'start playlist radio' to let Spotify find me other emerging bands that sound like this.

This is a pretty solid way to discover new music, but you do need that jumping off point to enable you to say to it 'find me stuff like this'.

Do you ever select an artist or song and make a "Radio Station" from it? I find that to be a great way of finding new artists to enjoy.

You can do the same for playlists too. Makes the seeding even broader.

You used to be able to use apps like Last.fm which would add random functionality, but they discontinued apps, which made me ditch Spotify.

"If you love music and respect the artists, songwriters and everyone else who makes great music possible, use a licensed service that compensates artists and other rights holders."

It seems so easy compensate that second group that I work harder breathing each day. That first group, it seems like I could get a message to mars easier than to send them a whole dollar.

To be fair, companies such as Bandcamp are making this easier every day. If you're an artist and want to be directly paid by your fans, it is becoming easier every day. However I agree that a big part of the industry is still very opaque (including services like Spotify, unfortunately)

Yes. I have high hopes for Patreon and similar services to change this though.

Buy a t-shirt. That's the most direct route to actually help them out with as few middlemen as possible.

Can somebody verify this? I'm one who used Groove Shark to discovered music that I really like and then bought it in an effort to support the musician (thanks big music, you just took away one of your means of extracting money out of me).

I would happily wear the t-shirt if I knew that it was in fact the most direct route to actually transfer money to the musician.

I remember that most bands, especially small ones made most of their money off merch. Not sure how it works for larger bands though.

I was a professional musician for 15 years. After having kids, the amount of time that I would've had to spend on the road playing and selling t shirts would've far outweighed the time I would've had to be home raising them, so I started teaching myself development in the tour bus. That was 7 years ago.

My old band is still out there, selling out Red Rocks, and any of their merch that you can buy at the show has the highest margin of anything. This is true for every band from John Mayer to the Avett Brothers to your local Dead cover band.

So help me God, buy a shirt at the show or on their website.

... and in strange aeons, shutdown messages themselves can shutdown.

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, it could have really been a hit. I could easily imagine Google gobbling them up and merging it with Vevo. It isn't a dramatically different service than YouTube. But it wasn't to be.

Doesn't it make sense to open source code when you know the product is dying?

[0] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/23/cheaper-bandwidth-...

>> Doesn't it make sense to open source code when you know the product is dying?

That can depend on how much of the code base is their own. If they integrated any licensed components then they may not have the resources necessary to clean it up for release.

They own zero percent of the codebase. According to the link all IP was turned over to the winners of the court case.

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

can you provide a link please? The search for "streamer" on chrome extensions results in many products.

Not the person you asked, but possibly this (googled "streamer chrome" directly): https://streamus.com/

They had to hand over all their IP as part of the settlement so I doubt the product will be open sourced.

I think he meant make it Open Source before the settlement.

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 gone. Hopefully they'll spin off some new businesses in the area. Otherwise this will be a huge blow to Gainesville's already struggling tech and startup communities.

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.

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. :)

> 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.

Would you have a problem with it if they gave it away for free (and didn't have to worry about covering their operating costs, via a hypothetical deus ex machina?)

> today it's clear that the existing taxi business model needed to be disrupted in order to improve the consumer experience.

I very strongly disagree with this premise, though perhaps that's getting into a different debate.

> Looking around here, I'm not sure what negative sentiment you're referring to

I wasn't referring just to the comments on here, FWIW.

Would you have a problem with it if they gave it away for free (and didn't have to worry about covering their operating costs, via a deus ex machina?)

That's a good question... I honestly don't know!

I'd definitely have less of a problem with it... which is, I realize, pretty dumb as that doesn't alleviate the harm to the artists.

About the only intellectual justification I can come up with is that, as a free service, it's easier to position something like that as a way to discover artists. I think, by selling a subscription, their customers would be more likely to view their consumption as legitimate, and so wouldn't feel compelled to later turn around and buy the music they were listening to.

But again, that's my intellectualizing a position I can't honestly explain.

> I'd definitely have less of a problem with it... which is, I realize, pretty dumb as that doesn't alleviate the harm to the artists.

> About the only intellectual justification I can come up with is that, as a free service, it's easier to position something like that as a way to discover artists. I think, by selling a subscription, their customers would be more likely to view their consumption as legitimate, and so wouldn't feel compelled to later turn around and buy the music they were listening to.

Well, think of it this way: that's exactly what public libraries already do - their funding comes from tax dollars, so they don't need to turn an operating profit

Actually, public libraries are arguably worse, because tax revenues tax not just the consumers, but the artists themselves. Not only do they give artists' work away for free to consumers, but artists are actually forced to pay for others to access their work for free!

Yeah, but when it comes to libraries there's a public-good element to their activities, as they provide access to those materials for those who otherwise may not be able to afford them.

In addition, a library, as a source of physical copies, can't lend and re-lend the same content over and over. Which is why, of course, ebook lending programs at libraries are often limited to a certain number of copies... there's an attempt to apply that same restriction to digital content.

Lastly, the lending is always time-limited, unlike digital services.

> Yeah, but when it comes to libraries there's a public-good element to their activities, as they provide access to those materials for those who otherwise may not be able to afford them.

How is that any different from free services like Grooveshark, The Pirate Bay, Napster, etc.?

I really need to explain to you that the poor don't generally have computers? Or internet access? :)

But.. they have access to libraries with computers... More seriously, most of the world doesn't have easy access to libraries like US or some other developed countries while they do have access to decent internet.

You might be surprised how many poor do have computer/internet access. Different regions look different, even within the U.S., and there are many different modalities of living amongst the poor.

There are laws that protect taxi companies and laws that protect music companies. For whatever reason you sympathize more with the disruption of one vs the other.

No, there are laws that protect taxi companies and their drivers, and laws that protect music artists.

Don't mistake "big music" as being the only beneficiaries of copyright law. That's simply demagoguery.

Sharing is the most ethical thing there is.

First Liger, now Grooveshark. I only have a semester left but a large portion of the Gainesville I know and love has vanished pretty quickly in the last month :(

Wait, you talking about Neon Liger? They shut down?

I completely agree with you. Hopefully something will come to fill the space that Grooveshark left, but Grooveshark did a lot for the tech community there. GroovesharkU, presentations, events, etc. They'll definitely be missed.

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...

<sigh>

Is it time to build a personal, private, self-hosted, open-source grooveshark clone?

I hope playlist data wasn't part of the settlement, and that we will be able to recover it.

It would be detrimental to the artists to have some of their fans not be able to find them again, right? Perhaps record companies care less about the artists which are forgettable in the first place.

My best guess is that the playlist data (and any other relevant user data) is probably the reason the legal action even happened. What's honesty more valuable to whichever company is primarily responsible for the suit: the profits said company stands to gain now that Grooveshark is out of the way, or the behavioral user data of 10 years of internet music streaming on a front-runner service? My bet is on the later.

You can already run your own streaming service with Subsonic today. What are you waiting for?

http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp ?

This seems like an interesting project. I've never heard about it before, though I do wish it was an open-source one...

Subsonic is GPL.

I've been running it for a few years now. I especially like using it with iSub on iOS, though that isn't under active development anymore (it's GPL now, too).

The official android app seems closed source though.

Both Subsonic and the unofficial DSub can be found on F-Droid.

Subsonic + iSub is absolutely wonderful, been a huge fan of that combo for years.

I moved personally to Ampache http://ampache.org which I found lighter and smoother than Subsonic, and it is working with Subsonic clients.

You could do some anonymous block-chain ledger type-service, really doubt that it would win over simply bit-torrent though, and ultimately I'm kind of biased since I really would prefer that real creators get to exercise their rights.

What is this blind obsession with "THIS NEEDS A BLOCKCHAIN!!!!!!!"? There's nothing, absolutely nothing, in a system of storing playlists which needs decentralized canonical ordering. A blockchain is literally one of the most inefficient ways of storing data imaginable, and serves no purpose here other than a buzz word.

Some people have never heard of a DHT, and think that "blockchain" is a workable primitive instead of a high-level tool. It's like immediately jumping to "let's create a table for that in Postgres" instead of first considering whether the problem could be solved with a dictionary.

Also, if people are looking for something to use as a primitive, I'd much rather they look at Freenet. :)

> There's nothing, absolutely nothing

No, there is something. You could use the blockchain as a decentralized torrent tracker.

Why on earth does that need canonical ordering.

It's not about the canonical ordering. It's about storing the pointers to files in a way that cannot be taken down by authorities. The playlists themselves could be stored anywhere, including but not necessarily in the blockchain.

Not really open source, but plex works pretty well for hosting and making your private collection accessible. Works awesome with chromescasts as well.

You can connect an existing iTunes library to Plex and stream it anywhere.

You can also have Plex organize your music, but I've only ever used the iTunes part

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...

Did any of the remixes come from here? http://ocremix.org/game/135/ninja-gaiden-ii-the-dark-sword-o...

> Is it time to build a personal, private, self-hosted, open-source grooveshark clone?

Popcorn Time [1] meets Spotify?

[1] https://popcorntime.io/

Sort of already exists, for usenet at least https://github.com/rembo10/headphones

There used to be HipHop [0], a simple app that scraped mp3 sites and streamed music from them. Although it was fully functional (and still appears to work on my side), there is no music discovery, only search - which is a limiting factor for this app. Previous discussion on hn [1].

[0] https://github.com/hiphopapp/hiphop [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7850613

I tried building an primitive version of that idea a few years ago, called Downstream [1] that scoured MP3 spider sites for URLs, then fed them into AxWMPLib (MS's drop-in media player).

It had a few ideas that were before their time, like a playlist DJ, and what a 17 year old me thought passed for a 'stylish UI' [2]

[1] https://github.com/MattRyder/Downstream

[2] http://screenshots.en.sftcdn.net/en/scrn/328000/328491/downs...

If you don't have an external backup, don't complain about losing data.

Services like Grooveshark are no exception.

Yes. Obviously. I should have been downloading the tracks I was listening too and wring my own scripts to parse and save my playlist data with the full expectation that the service I had been paying for would be terminated without warning...

Guess I'll know for next time.

There were add-ons to seamless download songs as you played them, as we as playlists

Honestly, yes. Even if you were paying money for it, Grooveshark was blatantly, flagrantly illegal.

I wrote about my self-hosted alternative https://jeena.net/private-music-streaming

You can probably recover your playlist. (Instructions for Chrome)

On the computer you used grooveshark on: visit the website, open developer tools, open "resources tab", click on local storage->grooveshark.com. Now find the key called 'libraryXXXXXX' where the X's are numbers. Right-click it, "edit value" and copy/paste that data here: https://json-csv.com.

Source of instructions: http://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/34goss/meta_groovesha...

I just made an account on this site so I could tell you this, but you just saved the last four years of my music collection. I can't tell you how incredibly thankful I am right now.

I just made an account also only to tell yuo that I am incredibly grateful for your help, my music is really important to me and you just saved my several-year collection. THANK YOU!!!

Late, but if your library gets truncated because it is huge like mine, you can instead get it by opening the console and typing JSON.stringify(localStorage); while on grooveshark.com

http://www.soundtrack.io/ is well under way from the Coding Soundtrack community that came together when TurnTable.fm was alive.

"As a part of a settlement agreement with the major record companies, we have agreed to cease operations immediately, wipe clean all of the record companies' copyrighted works and hand over ownership of this website, our mobile apps and intellectual property, including our patents and copyrights."

Ouch. Sounds harsh. Wonder if they had to turn over the user data as well...

I wonder if they had to make such an apologetic statement as well.

When you have a loaded gun down your throat...

A Hobson's choice is still a choice isn't it? Says so in the name anyway.

Sure, it's still a choice, but it's a situation where you don't have the upper hand and you are bound to lose no matter what you do.

If they've already lost control of the site it's unlikely they themselves were making this statement. Otherwise it is possible that it's an apology delineated by the settlement and likely written by lawyers.

There's a large number of artists who's CDs I've bought because I was able to listen to their entire album on Grooveshark. Artists who's radio songs didn't come close to demonstrating their true skills. Of course, I've also passed on CDs because I was able to find out an artist only has 1 or 2 songs worth listening to. This is seriously going to hinder my discovering of new music. I didn't even know they were in court but I knew it couldn't last.

Reposting a reply by Jackson800 to a comment below:

If you act quick, you can access some of your playlist data by logging in here: http://groovebackup.com/

WONDERFUL

It didn't have all of my playlists, but I was able to at least recover a small portion of my songs. Some is better than none...

That failed for most of my playlists and favorites.

However, it's also possible to get some playlists from your browsers local cache:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/h9ubz6l2uedt6mc/Screenshot%202015-...

Thank you, that worked great as it had majority of my library saved in JSON format.

Likewise, I was able to get most of my library from the "library" key

Yeah, looks like it keeps track of songs added to your collection in JSON format under the key "library<some big number>". Thanks for the heads-up.

As incontrovertibly illegal and probably unethical as this website was, I'm going to miss it. It was a great way to discover new music and I've become a fan of many artists that I found through it. There really is nothing like throwing a bunch of songs in the queue and saying "give me more music like this" using its radio service.

Thanks bro ! At least I could recover the name of the songs and artist of some songs that I had on grooveshark

Dear Grooveshark,

From the first day I saw your service, I had doubts about the legitimacy of what you were doing. After watching YouTube grow into a massive company - building on infringement then turning a corner through appeasement to the legacy media interests - I knew doing a pivot was possible. Every time I saw your name mentioned, it looked like you were refusing to play ball.

Part of me applauds anything that really pisses off the RIAA, and there's another part of me that has rational fear of what the RIAA is capable of doing through legal channels. Your service had a big bullseye painted on it, so I stayed far, far away. I never even bothered to check if my music ended up there...I was too busy focusing on channels I know to at least try to be in-line with artist payment methods (iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, Google, etc). I fully comprehend the notion of Safe Harbors, and also comprehend that there was no way - ever - that you could lawyer up enough to defeat RIAA.

Music is an industry that truly does need to evolve, as the current disruptions are helpful, but still lacking the genius innovation to best connect listeners and content producers in an equitable relationship. Will it ever happen? I'm optimistic. However, this day was inevitable, and as much as I'd like to compliment you on trying, I'm held back by the fact Grooveshark was, for lack of a better term, a white-washed piracy site. Good luck on your next endeavors, and I truly hope you learned from this experience.

- An Independent Musician

I'm actually surprised it lasted so long. The business model was wrong from the beginning.

The thing is that in the early months/years, nothing was working as well as Grooveshark. If the website made the big record make so move, all the Grooveshark team's work was not in vein.

Just a heads up, its vain, not vein. =))

Vein would be for blood in that case ;)

Thanks

I knew. I KNEW I should have backed up my music library. I once played a bit with their Javascript front-end and figured out how I could do it, but never got around to. I also planned on asking them to send me a copy -- I'm a paying customer, it seemed reasonable. A copy of the song list of course, not the songs themselves.

Now I only have what is cached locally on my phone. I've disabled WiFi and mobile data and opened the Grooveshark app: phew, it's still there (no remote wipe). I remember less than three days ago my subscription was renewed. The app locally checks the date, so I have a small month to get my data out of there.

One tiny bit of luck: I already figured out how to decrypt the locally stored songs back into mp3s. That's at least something... if I can dig up the script again.

Anyone ideas on how to get the full list back easily? Is there a data archive I can download for my "VIP" account?

Edit: reddit helps out! See: https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/34goss/meta_groovesh...

There is GoodForOneCare's comment with some Javascript (which didn't work for me, but gave me some hints) and there is http://groovebackup.com which retrieved a few playlists for me. That's something at least, whew.

Now let's see about extracting my phone's data...

Edit2: found my decryption script but it doesn't contain their encryption key. Guess I'll have to re-crack it, this time without Wireshark to capture the decrypted data. It's a simple substitution cipher though, shouldn't be too hard.

Edit3: pulling data from my phone, from the root of my sdcard (/dev/block/mmcblk0p16), the files are located in:

    /app/com.grooveshark* for the APK
    /data/com.grooveshark.android.v1 for stuff
    /media/0/Android/data/com.grooveshark.android.v1 for cache and offline files

Check here: http://groovebackup.com/

http://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/34goss/meta_groovesha...

How did you decrypt offlined files?

I have a bunch of songs trapped in the official app on an android device. I would love to know how to convert the .dat files into .mp3s or similar. please share

I haven't found a way yet, cracking the encryption is taking longer than I expected. I spent about a day on it now and it could take another few days, but I probably have the decryption key at home. I'll be home next Friday, so that would be the earliest time I could get to them (if I still have it).

Send me your email address at temp84293@lucb1e.com if you want to be updated when I found it. Or if you find anything, let me know too! :)

Update: I've found a way to decrypt it. The above email address is valid until at least 2015-05-31.

I was at UF working on another startup when GrooveShark started and was pretty familiar with how they started. One of our co-founders even did some design work for them. GrooveShark always had an awesome user experience, and I always wished their business model would be legitimized so their company can prosper and service consumers as how they should be.

I wish the best of luck to Sam and Josh. I hope they are able to take their passion onto other endeavors. Though UF has a lot of talented students, because Gainesville is a dinky city, it doesn't have the same startup resources as on the west cost. Grooveshark was able to give a lot of students the opportunity to work on something cool and bring some exposure to UF.

I switched to Rdio a few years ago, but before that I was a huge Grooveshark fan. Other commenters have mentioned this as well, but I think Grooveshark was waaaay ahead of their time with their HTML5 interface. I remember being absolutely floored by their big first redesign.

I interned at a quasi-competitor whose deal was to allow you to upload your own music (pre-Google Music) and I remember one of the founders constantly talking about how Grooveshark wouldn't last long with all the lawsuits. That was ~6 years ago, and honestly I'm astonished it took this long.

It's a shame to see it go. I don't have much faith in this happening, but hopefully some of the code makes it out of all this.

I've been a GS user since almost the beginning, back when there was a little java tool for uploading your music collection. GS gave me a way to access my library for free and in a consistent manner over the past decade. I waited for days as my library of 10000+ tracks (90% indie/alt + underground artists) uploaded to their servers.

GS was way ahead of the curve when it came to delivering music easily and widely. The HTML5 interface worked simly everywhere. Using a IE on a 360? 1st gen iPhone? Potato? Search as song, press play, enjoy.

GS filled a niche that Spotify cannot ever fill. Because GS was built upon the libraries of its users, all the little mp3s that had been hoarded, recorded, never officially released, fan remixes and safegaurded had been uploaded with the mainstream content. It was built on what users kept because they knew it could not be replaced. The special, the underground.

So long GS. "Hack the Gibson, hack the Gibson, I'm seedin' BitTorrents like a digital pimp, son."

Although it is not a direct replacement I've been honestly impressed by the app 6 seconds. It's by the same guy who created mp3.com and his team indexed radio station playlists in real time, something Google thought impossible.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2015/04/17/6seconds...

The lawsuit that killed it can be found here:

http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/mrgtoqd0/new-york-southern-...

As much as it must suck for Sam Tarantino & co., it must also be relieving in some measure - fighting such huge labels for so long must've been incredibly stressful.

Yet another anecdote here... for me, Grooveshark was the genesis of music discovery. Napster, limewire, etc. helped with artists I knew about already. mp3.com helped me with genres but did not expand my library too much. Early Last.fm/audioscrobbler was interesting to see what my friends were listening to, but it was not effortless to discover similar/new music there. Winamp shoutcast stations helped me to broaden my music portfolio, but there was no mechanism to save favorite songs/artists that I had heard, and re-listen to them. GS took the best of all those things and added more.

So I listened to GS for years. I owe GS a lot. Now I wonder if I, or if we had supported them more, would they have not met their demise?

Does anyone have a good sense for how hard it would be to operate a service like this in a vaguely legal way?

I understand that Grooveshark's own employees were instructed to download music and upload it to Grooveshark. If this had not been the case, or if they could not prove that this was the case, would their service be technically legal (safe harbor laws,etc)?

It must be, it's no different than youtube in that regard. This is a sad, sad day. I can't believe it.

You'd have thought they'ed be smarter than that. They go to all this trouble to get around the DMCA and then they get busted because they told the employees to upload music, from work computers no less.

IIRC, this was in the very beginning of the company, the first year or so.

This is really sad news. I used to look at the Grooveshark interfaces with awe. You guys were always on top of your usability and design, right down to the 400 error pages.

I really love the goal you guys had when you started on this journey, and I admire that you were forging a new path. Before all of these music services came out, you were the only reliable option for listening to music the way I wanted to.

Josh, thank you for taking time to share your story with me when I was in college writing Startups Open Sourced. I admire your enthusiasm and persistence, and you seem like an awesome person to work with in any capacity.

I wish everyone at Grooveshark the best.

Anyone know what patents they held? I wonder if music industry will leverage them to take down other sites who are acting within the law via patent suits.

I don't know enough about how the patent system works. Wikipedia says Grooveshark is a service of Escape Media Group Inc. A few results show up in Google's patent search for Escape Media Group Inc.

Edit to add link: https://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=pts&hl=en&q=inassign...

I'd guess it's simply legal hygiene to defend against a phoenix.

Grooveshark's radio was awesome. I cannot count how many artists I have discovered that way.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. The majority of my favorite playlists were filled with music I had slowly curated by favoriting songs I heard while listening to the radio stations. Even if I can still listen to my own music via youtube/vlc, the grooveshark ecosystem was a gem, and now it is gone

I was listening to music (on Grooveshark touch) while driving down the highway. The page refreshed and this came up, it was a very weird feeling.

This was the best music product I've ever used, and it was buggy as fuck sometimes. I used it so much I learned weird ways to get around the menu rendering issues on the html5/touch version of grooveshark. Even with its bugs it was my main music platform.

Thank you for your hard work. It was one of my favorite webapps.

Long live Grooveshark~

Mobile web client was seriously the buggiest piece of shit ever. Every week it introduced new little things that you had to find ways around. But I still battled it every time I got in my car so I could listen to exactly wtf I wanted to listen to. That will be missed greatly.

Honestly, what was Grooveshark doing that was hurting anybody? If you'd answer by saying 'The artists' or 'the record companies', you're dead wrong. Record companies have insane income, while artists and bands make up a large portion of the world's millionaires. New or less popular artists were sometimes even positively affected by their music being on the site, as it made finding their music easier. The companies who sued are only showing the world what they actually care about. Money. Yeah, money. Cash, loot, dollars, euro, yen, moo-lah. Whatever you want to call it. I'm not saying that Grooveshark was perfect or that it's employees were saints, but I am saying that they were treated unfairly. The RIAA is trash, and Grooveshark's demise is a testament to that. Personally, as a musical artist and as someone who loves music of all kinds, I would never trust my music with any of these companies. The only way I can feel toward artists who go along with what these companies is disgusted. My music will always be allowed on streaming websites, as long as I get proper credit for it, not payment. Credit.

As a long-time Grooveshark user, (paying) subscriber, and partner, this is a very sad event. I echo others in that Grooveshark's music service was one of the best out there in terms of their UI, audio quality and music discovery--I discovered TONS of new bands and artists thanks to them, and bough the music of those I really loved.

A word about Josh Greenberg, the co-founder and CTO of Grooveshark. He's an amazing guy. When I started my startup Metrical[0], he was the first person to give it a try--in a real, production environment. He put us in front of millions of users and was patient as we worked through bugs and issues. He really put faith in someone with a "cool idea" and gave me a shot. Thanks Josh!

Grooveshark was an amazing service, and will be missed. Josh, I'm looking forward to seeing you go on to bigger and better things.

Remember The Man In The Arena, by Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

0 - http://getMetrical.com

As someone who works full time in the music business, I shed no tears for Grooveshark.

The only thing I don't like about this situation is that there appears to be no settlement for the thousands (tens, hundreds?) of indie artists, labels, writers and publishers whose music was on the site.

10% revenue loss for an indie label or publisher has a far greater impact on their viability than 10% loss to <insert major label here>.

You make music because it's fun. If you're doing it for the money you're doing it wrong. If I could make even a single dime on my music it would be a privilege but I'm happy as it is.

Getting downvoted but my opinion stands: being a musician is not a job and you can't expect to get paid for it. It would be like expecting to get paid for playing video games. Making music is a leisure activity and a very rewarding one. Thinking you should make a living on it is just greedy. Get a normal job and create music for its own sake.

You can, infact, make a living with playing video games. I wonder how you would feel if I said developing is a big hobby of mine, a leisure activity, and a very rewarding one actually. You should not make money from that, get a real job, and practice your development hobby for its own sake.

Yes, I know you can. Just as you can make money making music. The important word here is "can". You are not however entitled to it. A lucky few gets paid but that's an extreme privilege you shouldn't take for granted.

The difference with development is that no-one questions the business model. You code and get paid for it while music is a completely different story. Before I became a professional developer I coded for fun and was happy with that. If the market would be like music (where 99% of artists cannot make a living out of it) then yes, I would say exactly that.

Nobody is "entitled" to make a living from making music. However, everyone is entitled to say "I have created some music. In exchange for some money I will give you a copy of this music".

You say "no-one questions the business model" which is clearly false. Have you never heard of a developer being asked to work for free (or equity) on someone else's idea? IMHO that's the same as you saying musicians should be grateful to earn any money from their work.

I hold the opinion you should not be paid to make software, in most cases, in this era. It tends to be an instrument for control and manipulation.

(ads)

So what's your economically sensical alternative?

Communism.

Cool. I don't agree, but at least you own it. =)

Oh don't worry, your masters at the labels and publishers got all their assets. Sorry you won't see a dime from them, either.

I run an indie label, distributor and publisher.

We pay out tens of thousands of US$ to artists, writers and labels every month.

People do and are making a living in all of these professions, but yes it is hard.

Not sure where all this vitriol comes from?

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.

8 Years. I have loved and listened on Grooveshark for the last 8 years. Since my first job while in highschool. You were the first app I have ever installed, on my company blackberry so I could listen on the commute. You let me send my highschool sweetheart songs of love and joy, let me express so effortlessly what I wanted to say when words fail. Her and I needed you through long nights at college, keeping us focused and energized. When I scored my first internship we offlined our entire collections for the 36 hour drive from Chicago to California. We drove that 4 more times with you. And finally, after the many years of sharing together and a college degree later, you were there to play the music as she walked down the isle.

I can genuinely say you made my life better, you have given me true happiness. Thank You.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB2YyAgg9Z4

"We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service."

That's one way of putting it. I'm sad to see grooveshark go but always wondered how the hell it was legal every time I used it. I guess it turns out it wasn't. To be honest I'm shocked it lasted this long.

To recover my collections and playlists i used:

webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PutYourUrlHere&strip=1

1. Seach your profile (or your profile's collection, playlist etc.) with Google.

2. Don't click search results, just copy the URL of your profile

3. Replace the text "PutYourUrlHere" with the URL you copied. It is important to include "&strip=1" at the end because it opens you the text version of the page, otherwise it won't work.

My cached profile page was from 28.3.2015, so at least I managed to save most of my data. groovebackup.com was not as useful as this approach.

Could you try it again and see if that still works? I couldn't get it (or any of the other methods) to work. Did they maybe update the robots.txt so google can't cache it anymore?

These things just make me more determined to stick by my music collection in mp3/ogg format, stored locally.

Until the digital rights to copy bits are globally declared we can't trust any company to provide continuous service, regardless of how well "licensed" they are. People are copying music anyway but the mafiaa make it difficult for you to create a public service or offer a public tool to do it easily, even if you're still exercising your fundamental rights to manipulate your own computer and your own storage in any way you like.

I've been using them for the last 2 years and had a huge playlist. Is there any way to retrieve the playlist? groovebackup.com just returns "Missing data for playlist"

bummer. There goes allll my playlists.

Same here. I've kind of dreaded this day and thought why is there no standardized 'playlist protocol' or playlist format that music services could share. This is like the 4th time I've had an old music service shut down and lost all my playlists with no migration path.

There is a standard (more-or-less) playlist format: m3u. The trick is convincing services to implement export of that information.

The problem may be that the m3u would contains artist name, song title, and position in the playlist, and even if you could export this, it would not be very robust to import somewhere else.

Playlists aren't illegal, what are the odds of a possibility for extraction ?

Well considering that they've handed over the servers and data to the plaintiffs... you probably shouldn't hold your breath

I've always noticed random songs disappearing from my collection but procrastinated doing anything about it. I wrote a script two weeks ago to download my entire collection to avoid potentially losing some really great songs. Talk about good timing. I always knew grooveshark would be temporary and possibly unreliable but I did not expect an unannounced closure with no ability to extract our collection metadata.

First, Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

Second, So the major music companies own the music I created and uploaded as past of the GrooveShark artist program?

Well, I'm sorta sad and pissed. I was in their original $30/year plan and I got charged like 1 month ago... No refund? :(

If it was on a credit card, you could try contacting the bank for a refund. I don't know exactly the rules/laws about it, but I'd think only getting 1/12th of what you paid for is pretty good cause to get most of it back.

I used a debit card :(. But yeah, even getting half back would've been nice.

This is a good reminder that I should stop using my debit card online, thanks!

Oh, shit ! And now I lost my favourite music lists without possibility of recovering. I had some music there that I can't find in other places. Great..... If they could allow to recover these lists (Author - Song) on text. You are doing "good bye" in a way that a lot of user would hate.

You can probably recover your playlist. (Instructions for Chrome) On the computer you used grooveshark on: visit the website, open developer tools, open "resources tab", click on local storage->grooveshark.com. Now find the key called 'libraryXXXXXX' where the X's are numbers. Right-click it, "edit value" and copy/paste that data here: https://json-csv.com. Source of instructions: http://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/34goss/meta_groovesha...

I would pay money to get my playlists which I painstakingly curated back. (They weren't on http://groovebackup.com.)

And I thought I would learn after I lost a bunch of stuff when megaupload got shut down...

They were amazing. Rest in peace.

I really respect Sam as a CEO. Anytime I've seen him talk about the music industry, it has been fresh and his ideas could really fix it. I used grooveshark for as long as I could, but moved to Spotify about a year ago.

Eh, after a couple years with a paid GS subscription I switched to a higher quality paid service a while ago. Grooveshark's brutally bad album support, combined with the penchant for content just vanishing from my playlists, rendered the service nearly useless to me in the long run.

AFAICT, it's most unique feature was community radios... a feature I'd love to see replicated elsewhere but is, as for as I know anyway, still unduplicated.

Which service did you move to?

I've personally switched to Google Play Music, mostly out of sheer convenience. Previously I used just the free service to upload my own stuff... the amount of storage they offer is pretty huge and the sync app isn't too bad.

Then I decided to give All Access a try and discovered a pretty enormous selection at a decent price (double what I was paying for my GS subscription, but with a properly curated library that doesn't disappear randomly), with full offlining support to my phone.

Overall I've been incredibly happy. I'm sure other services are as good or better but I've not found a reason, yet, to shop around so I figure I'll stick with Play for the foreseeable future.

Wow, was listening to some Sturgill Simpson, went out and came back to a "server is having issues" page. Refreshed it later and this happens!

If you act quick, you can access some of your playlist data by logging in here:

http://groovebackup.com/

I couldn't get everything back, but could get a few of my playlists at least...

That's a really quick shutdown... there should have been some fair warning.

BTW, Sturgill Simpson was the best find I've had for new music in a long, long time. You gotta see him live if you get a chance. Little Joe, his guitarist, somehow keeps getting better and better!

Never heard of Sturgill Simpson. While reading your comment I copied the name and habitually went to paste it into Grooveshark :(

edit: I haven't gotten excited about any guitar based music in a long time, least of all country, this band is great!

Oh no! I'm so sorry to see you go! :( But I think it's awful not to have at least one days or a few hours notice. I've been a loyal follower for years and have so many amazing playlists I've carefully cultivated on there. I know it was perhaps foolish to do so on this site alone, but my God, I'm heartbroken. Is there no way of recovering just the lists of song names? Pleeeease?

I can't believe that grooveshark's actually gone. there was a time when it didn't work on our computer, and it was awful. Grooveshark's always been my go-to place for music, and I loved it. Now that it's gone, I'm super sad and angry. I had all my music on there, and it's all gone :( all I have now is what I can remember. Imma miss you guys.

Why embed the message in an image, instead of text?

If you don't know CSS and already laid off the person who does, then it's a good way to center text.

I'd be inclined to agree if "text-align: center" weren't already in the page source...

genuine question: do you think all the employees didn't know till today, and is being let go all at the same time?

All this time that's what I've been thinking too.

Maybe this has to do something with search engines, but why ?

Uau that was a big surprise! I have been using this service for such a long time. Now, what would be the best alternatives available ?

Perhaps any of the alternatives they listed on their site?

I found it interesting that they omitted two very obvious alternatives (Pandora and Slacker Radio). An overt snub, or simply no point in naming two of the most well known services?

I think Pandora is US only, certainly not available in the UK. Which is a shame, because it was brilliant about 10 years ago when I was allowed to listen to it. Maybe that's one of the reasons it wasn't listed?

It's not so great these days, at least in the free version. Ads every other song, sometimes more ads than songs in a given hour, and (at least on my phone) it's a battery hog. I prefer Slacker.

Pandora doesn't provide the same service. They purely do "radio" and don't let you make playlists or play specific songs.

I can't explain Slacker's omission though.

I thought Pandora offered playlists in their paid tier? I've never paid for it so I don't know the details of their full service.

Their paid service just removes ads, and adds some minor enhancements like allowing more skips.

>allowing more skips

Hmm, I'd think if I'm paying for the service I could skip as many times as I want.

Thanks for the info!

Yeah, you'd think....

Pandora is a weird service. They pay less for their music in exchange for putting restrictions on it that make it less likely to substitute for music purchases. It really is supposed to just be radio, and they do things like limit skips so that you can't just skip ahead until you get to the exact song you want to listen to. The music companies want you to still go out and buy the album if you want to do that. On the other hand, Pandora is cheaper, at $5/month versus, for example, $10/month for Spotify.

Personally, I wish I could get Pandora's selection algorithm's into Spotify and have the best of both worlds.

They're only available in the US/Canada and sometimes Europe, so maybe the request is for global alternatives.

I'm in Europe, and I can't access Pandora. It says it's only available in US/Canada, doesn't mention any other locations.

At which point customers once again learn about DRM.

I'm frankly amazed there are HN readers who didn't already realise this.

Piracy: The Better Choice(tm). http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1043337/hd-disk-for...

When BMI and ASCAP can shut down a coffee house "open mic" night in 24 hours it's absolutely astonishing that grooveshark lasted as long as it did.

But what's the harm? Just torrent the music you want, or if your daddy's rich, buy it for 99 cents or whatever.

I've used them and assumed they had sorted the licensing issues.

I don't necessarily agree with the licensing model the music and film industries are using, but I'm surprised that, being so visible, they were able to keep going for so long without running into trouble.

I used Grooveshark, they had the best service and they company was awesome.

Is a shame the music industry is rotten and went as far as to kill this awesome company. My best wish for the team, you guys are great, dont let this get you down.

And kudos for your all these years!

I loved Grooveshark, but I knew from day one it was only a matter of time until their legal issues would catch up to them.

Loved the service though.

Every time they shut down a service like this 5 more pop up, so everyone will just start using the next incarnation.

Introducing Sharkster!

Very sad to hear it. You guys made an awesome service with a gorgeous UI/UX. Your recommendation engine was the best of its kind. I wish you strength through difficult time and I'm sure you'll do great in future.

"[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...

I loved this site. It had virtually all the music I listen, even some buried/abandonded tracks that are fairly hard to find online and are almost never on paid services. Goodbye, sweet prince.

SeeqPod paved the way for Grooveshark and Spotify and was one of the first streaming search engines. They got acquired by Sony and that could still be an option for Grooveshark.

>>As part of the settlement agreement with the major record companies, we have agreed to cease operations immediately, wipe clean all of the record companies’ copyrighted works and hand over ownership of this website, our mobile apps and intellectual property, including our patents and copyrights.

Wow - a company comprehensively crushed and defeated.

super cruddy of them not to send anything out about this going down was using a week or two ago and now all the songs and play lists gone just a let down majorly.

I think I am going to wear my Grooveshark shirt today.

"That was wrong. We apologize"... After what, 3-4 years of mainly illegal content? Wow :) if only every crime was that easy to deal with. It's very Wall Street of them.

This seems to be the result of civil, not criminal proceedings, so a far cry from a proven crime.

The burden of proof is MUCH higher in criminal proceedings and for that reason we have "innocent until proven guilty" presumption.

Civil matters often come down to who has deeper pockets and more lawyers.

Unlicensed, not illegal.

My dictionary defines illegal as “contrary to or forbidden by law”. If you're distributing material without permission it's still illegal even if you stick your fingers in your ears while loudly shouting “na na na I can't hear you!”

Perhaps pedantic, but "fair use" usage of a work would fall under "unlicensed but legal".

The content is not illegal. Illegal content would be stuff like child pornography.

Trying to redefine the question will not make your earlier wrong answer correct. At no point has anyone questioned the legality of the actual music – the discussion has always been about whether it was legal for them to share copies.

I wasn't answering, I was nitpicking :)

So why a picture of text rather than just text?

Man that sucks...I liked Grooveshark !

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo...

Grooveshark changed my life.

Damn. It was very useful.

now I turn back to last.fm why are they still up?

man that sucks...I liked Grooveshark.

RIP

A good alternative is to use the web version of Spotify (https://play.spotify.com/) with AdBlock.

Wow! I had no idea that they had a web only client. Thanks. I definitely prefer webapps to desktop installs.

So, the music industry most likely now has all the information about everyone who used GrooveShark. What are the chances they start suing uploaders, or even just heavy users?

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

I discovered it a few minutes ago because I had just purchased a Premium Spotify license and opened Grooveshark to export my collections.

All my favorite songs, albums and bands were listed there, and only there. I used Grooveshark for a few years, and enjoyed it. Thank you for that.

But also fuck you.

Throwing away data like that is unforgivable for a service. Imagine Facebook disappearing with your list of friends, or Google Docs with your documents. Since ownership was transferred, I don't expect to see my data again. And this destroys all goodwill I had.

"The writing was on the wall!" Whose wall? Certainly not mine, not with Youtube and its obviously pirated songs still existing.

Thank you for the generous service, Grooveshark, but fuck you for destroying my music collection.

(no, it's not on groovebackup.com)

I got off Grooveshark years ago because it was obvious it wasn't going to be around forever, I am actually pretty darn surprised they lasted as long as they did. Either you ignored the signs or were blissfully unaware.

> Throwing away data like that is unforgivable for a service.

Did you consider that immediate deletion of the data might have been part of the settlement agreement, and that there was (for Grooveshark or their owners) therefor not much of a choice to do otherwise?

I fail to see how my list of song titles infringes copyright and requires immediate deletion.

You might fail to see it but it was seen by the lawyers who demanded or negotiated the settlement from the other side of the table where Grooveshark sat. The users weren't a part of the discussion and the winning side--the music industry--was able to get exactly what it wanted because otherwise they'd bankrupt Grooveshark.

> Imagine Facebook disappearing with your list of friends, or Google Docs with your documents.

Yes, I imagine it on a daily basis. That's how the cloud works. It's happened before, and it will happen again. Any cloud based data is bound to disappear at any second because of a hack (ask Matt Hunan), because of a court order you are not aware of, because of an in-court-or-out-of-court settlement you are not part of and not aware of. Lots of reasons. That's why I don't actually trust the cloud as anything but backup.

Furthermore, anything not backed up offline (even if there's an online backup) is also in danger from malicious actors.

The only person to blame for not keeping a backup (of just the song titles, no less) is yourself. Use expletives if it makes you feel better, though, by all means.

I learned that the hard way a month ago when I found that all my photos from the past 6 years that I had been storing on Dropbox had been mysteriously deleted :(

Storing != backing up

Still trying to let go of ever having those visual memories again. Certainly you're right that it's no one's fault but our own, but that doesn't make the lose any easier to deal with. I do blame Dropbox though, considering I'm a paying customer. When it happened I saw that the actual backup feature costs extra.

Dropbox may be a ok syncing service but it's a pretty shitty backup service given any collaborators can delete your files. Suffice it to say I'll be backing up locally and finding an alternative to Dropbox.

(Sort of a tangent/rant/vent there, but if anyone has a recommendation for cloud backups I'd love to hear.)

No cloud experience myself that sounds useful to you, but BackBlaze seem to be everyone's favorite around here -- but do note that they are purely a "backup" rather than "storage" service.

They delete stuff you have not backed up in the last 30 days. If you have a removable drive that you backed up to backblaze, it must go through their program again once every 30 days, or they will consider this abandoned.

Ask yourself this, now: Why cloud, when $70 buys you a 1TB portable hard drive with ~100MB/sec bandwidth (that you don't have at all unless you live in Japan or Korea, and that you don't get to Dropbox/BackBlaze even if you live there).

Yev from Backblaze here -> You're not wrong. In fact we recommend having an on-site backup FIRST, then moving on to other backup mediums. I wrote a post about it -> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/. Online backup is great, but local backup will always be quicker to get data on to and off of!

Do you keep a backup of your list of Facebook friends, your HN posts and "saved stories"?

Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Any facebook contact I care about is already in my email program's contacts (Thunderbird, local, backed up) and my phone (contacts) - and I prefer to contact them without using facebook as an intermediary.

Whenever there's an interesting story on HN I think I'd want to refer to later, I bookmark&cache it locally.

And posts/comments I deem worthy to save, I do save a copy of locally, although that's about one in fifty I make.

I know that's not common, and furthermore in the event of a global facebookgeddon, it is likely my bookmarks would be useless. But in the case of a local cloudgeddon (see e.g. the Matt Hunan story), I'm mostly covered.

I didn't know about groovebackup.com

Regarding shutdown - I saw that coming - put a few favourite songs into a text file :/

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