Grooveshark
Encyclopedia
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 that can be played immediately or added to a playlist
. An optional paid subscription provides additional functionality and removes advertisements from the user interface.
Grooveshark streams 100 to 110 million songs per month. In April 2009, its audience grew at a rate of 2–3% per day. On May 9, 2011, the Grooveshark team did a countdown to 35,000,000 registered users. It was live streamed on Ustream.tv.
'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. 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. 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 MP3
s, 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.
company. EMG was founded in March 2006 by three University of Florida
undergrad students. Sam Tarantino, a "down-on-his-luck economics major", and now CEO
of Grooveshark, was on his way to donate plasma when he passed a record store with a sign that said "buy/sell/trade CDs", and had the idea to apply that to digital music.
Grooveshark launched in private beta in early 2007, and was initially a paid music download service. The music was sourced from their proprietary P2P network
, facilitated by a downloadable client application. Grooveshark offered a unique purchase model whereby upon purchase, the person who uploaded the transacted song was paid a portion of the total cost of the song. Grooveshark positioned itself as a legal competitor to other popular P2P networks like LimeWire
.
, EMG has discontinued their paid download service and has repositioned itself as an online music jukebox, similar in functionality to services like Pandora
and Last.fm
.
On October 27, 2009, Grooveshark introduced a new user interface
, which provides a look similar to iTunes
. Also, users were now able to skip forward and backward to any point in a song.
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.
, EMG employed around 80 people, many of whom were students of the nearby University of Florida, and had secured just under $1 million in seed funding in 2009.
On March 23, 2011, Grooveshark announced a partnership with Pushbutton, an interactive design agency to bring Grooveshark apps to different platforms including Microsoft Mediaroom
.
For all the content on Grooveshark that is user-generated, the site relies on users to follow guidelines when uploading. Grooveshark’s Terms of Service
outlines that no user content shall be “illegal, obscene, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, infringing of intellectual property rights, or otherwise injurious to third parties or objectionable.” It is Grooveshark’s policy to honor all takedown requests that comply with the requirements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(DMCA) and other applicable intellectual property laws.
In December 2010, Grooveshark launched a revamped copyright management page which included a new web-based DMCA takedown tool to help content owners manage material on Grooveshark and communicate when content needs to be removed. Grooveshark CEO Sam Tarantino maintains the company strictly follows the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
takedown procedures, usually removing content expeditiously.
Grooveshark has licensing deals with both independent and major record labels, publishers and PROs, including EMI
and Sun Records
.
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. UMG filed a second lawsuit against Grooveshark in November 2011 citing internal documents revealing that Grooveshark employees uploaded thousands of illegal copies of UMG-owned recordings. Grooveshark responded by saying that this was a "gross mischaracterisation of information that Grooveshark itself provided to Universal." 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.
In March 2010, Pink Floyd
sued EMI
, claiming that it has no right to sell their songs except as part of full albums because it reduced the albums' artistic integrity. Pink Floyd won against EMI, preventing the band's long-time record label from selling individual songs online, which prompted the band's removal from Grooveshark.
In April 1, 2011, the Grooveshark app was pulled, without their consent, from the Android Market.
Streaming media
Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a streaming provider.The term "presented" is used in this article in a general sense that includes audio or video playback. The name refers to the delivery method of the medium rather...
search engine
Search engine
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. Search engines help to minimize the time required to find information and the amount of information...
, music streaming service and music recommendation web software application, allowing users to search for, stream, and upload music that can be played immediately or added to a playlist
Playlist
In its most general form, a playlist is simply a list of songs. They can be played in sequential or shuffled order. The term has several specialized meanings in the realms of radio broadcasting and personal computers.-In radio:...
. An optional paid subscription provides additional functionality and removes advertisements from the user interface.
Grooveshark streams 100 to 110 million songs per month. In April 2009, its audience grew at a rate of 2–3% per day. On May 9, 2011, the Grooveshark team did a countdown to 35,000,000 registered users. It was live streamed on Ustream.tv.
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 PandoraPandora (music service)
Pandora Radio is an automated music recommendation service and custodian of the Music Genome Project available only in the United States. The service plays musical selections similar to song suggestions entered by a user...
'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. 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
Rich Internet application
A Rich Internet Application is a Web application that has many of the characteristics of desktop application software, typically delivered either by way of a site-specific browser, via a browser plug-in, independent sandboxes, extensive use of JavaScript, or virtual machines...
that was first written in ActionScript
ActionScript
ActionScript is an object-oriented language originally developed by Macromedia Inc. . It is a dialect of ECMAScript , and is used primarily for the development of websites and software targeting the Adobe Flash Player platform, used on Web pages in the form of...
using the Adobe Flex
Adobe Flex
Adobe Flex is a software development kit released by Adobe Systems for the development and deployment of cross-platform rich Internet applications based on the Adobe Flash platform...
framework that ran in Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to web pages. Flash is frequently used for advertisements, games and flash animations for broadcast...
. 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. Grooveshark's design implements various sliding panels to categorize and display lists of information, similar in style to that of the Apple iPhone
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
. A right-aligned black modal window
Modal window
In user interface design, a modal window is a child window that requires users to interact with it before they can return to operating the parent application, thus preventing the workflow on the application main 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
Java Web Start
In computing, Java Web Start is a framework developed by Sun Microsystems that allows users to start application software for the Java Platform directly from the Internet using a web browser....
application. The upload program scans folders specified for MP3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
s, uploading and adding them to the user's online library on the service. The ID3
ID3
ID3 is a metadata container most often used in conjunction with the MP3 audio file format. It allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number, and other information about the file to be stored in the file itself....
information of the uploaded song is linked to the user and the file is uploaded to Grooveshark which allows on-demand
Video on demand
Video on Demand or Audio and Video On Demand are systems which allow users to select and watch/listen to video or audio content 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.
Subscription services
Standard Grooveshark accounts are and will always be free, but Grooveshark offers two subscription services that give users increased features, no banner ads and playability on mobile devices.- ’’’Grooveshark Plus:’’’ $6 USD/month or $60 USD/year
- No banner ads on Grooveshark or any affiliated sites
- More customizable features, such as access to a wider variety of skins
- Access to the Grooveshark Desktop application
- Sneak peaks of latest developments on Grooveshark Preview
- ’’’Grooveshark Anywhere:’’’ $9 USD/month or $90 USD/year
- All of the features of Grooveshark Plus
- Unlimited access to mobile applications for smart phones
History
Grooveshark is a service of Escape Media Group Inc (EMG), a Gainesville, FLGainesville, Florida
Gainesville is the largest city in, and the county seat of, Alachua County, Florida, United States as well as the principal city of the Gainesville, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area . The preliminary 2010 Census population count for Gainesville is 124,354. Gainesville is home to the sixth...
company. EMG was founded in March 2006 by three University of Florida
University of Florida
The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a campus in Gainesville, Florida. The university traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906...
undergrad students. Sam Tarantino, a "down-on-his-luck economics major", and now CEO
Chief executive officer
A chief executive officer , managing director , Executive Director for non-profit organizations, or chief executive is the highest-ranking corporate officer or administrator in charge of total management of an organization...
of Grooveshark, was on his way to donate plasma when he passed a record store with a sign that said "buy/sell/trade CDs", and had the idea to apply that to digital music.
Grooveshark launched in private beta in early 2007, and was initially a paid music download service. The music was sourced from their proprietary P2P network
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
, facilitated by a downloadable client application. Grooveshark offered a unique purchase model whereby upon purchase, the person who uploaded the transacted song was paid a portion of the total cost of the song. Grooveshark positioned itself as a legal competitor to other popular P2P networks like LimeWire
LimeWire
LimeWire is a free peer-to-peer file sharing client program that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and other operating systems supported by the Java software platform. LimeWire uses the gnutella network as well as the BitTorrent protocol. A free software version and a purchasable "enhanced"...
.
, EMG has discontinued their paid download service and has repositioned itself as an online music jukebox, similar in functionality to services like Pandora
Pandora (music service)
Pandora Radio is an automated music recommendation service and custodian of the Music Genome Project available only in the United States. The service plays musical selections similar to song suggestions entered by a user...
and Last.fm
Last.fm
Last.fm is a music website, founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. It has claimed 30 million active users in March 2009. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for UK£140m ....
.
On October 27, 2009, Grooveshark introduced a new user interface
User interface
The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–machine interaction, is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the...
, which provides a look similar to iTunes
ITunes
iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....
. Also, users were now able to skip forward and backward to any point in a song.
In 2010, Grooveshark was noted by Time Magazine
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
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.
, EMG employed around 80 people, many of whom were students of the nearby University of Florida, and had secured just under $1 million in seed funding in 2009.
On March 23, 2011, Grooveshark announced a partnership with Pushbutton, an interactive design agency to bring Grooveshark apps to different platforms including Microsoft Mediaroom
Microsoft Mediaroom
Microsoft Mediaroom is the latest update of the Microsoft TV IPTV Edition platform software, which is the Smart TV platform from Microsoft that is intended for interactive television use to access on-demand, live television programming, and applications via a 10-foot user interface...
.
Licensing and Criticism
On April 18, 2011, Grooveshark’s Sr. VP of External Affairs Paul Geller released an open letter to the music industry regarding Grooveshark’s legality in an effort to explain how Grooveshark is legal, even though it is not completely licensed.For all the content on Grooveshark that is user-generated, the site relies on users to follow guidelines when uploading. Grooveshark’s Terms of Service
Terms of Service
Terms of service are rules which one must agree to abide by in order to use a service. Unless in violation of consumer protection laws, such terms are usually legally binding...
outlines that no user content shall be “illegal, obscene, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, infringing of intellectual property rights, or otherwise injurious to third parties or objectionable.” It is Grooveshark’s policy to honor all takedown requests that comply with the requirements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Digital Millennium Copyright Act
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization . It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to...
(DMCA) and other applicable intellectual property laws.
In December 2010, Grooveshark launched a revamped copyright management page which included a new web-based DMCA takedown tool to help content owners manage material on Grooveshark and communicate when content needs to be removed. Grooveshark CEO Sam Tarantino maintains the company strictly follows the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Digital Millennium Copyright Act
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization . It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to...
takedown procedures, usually removing content expeditiously.
Grooveshark has licensing deals with both independent and major record labels, publishers and PROs, including EMI
EMI
The EMI Group, also known as EMI Music or simply EMI, is a multinational music company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the fourth-largest business group and family of record labels in the recording industry and one of the "big four" record companies. EMI Group also has a major...
and Sun Records
Sun Records
Sun Records is a record label founded in Memphis, Tennessee, starting operations on March 27, 1952.Founded by Sam Phillips, Sun Records was known for giving notable musicians such as Elvis Presley , Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and Johnny Cash...
.
Universal Music Group
Universal Music Group
Universal Music Group is an American music group, the largest of the "big four" record companies by its commanding market share and its multitude of global operations...
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. UMG filed a second lawsuit against Grooveshark in November 2011 citing internal documents revealing that Grooveshark employees uploaded thousands of illegal copies of UMG-owned recordings. Grooveshark responded by saying that this was a "gross mischaracterisation of information that Grooveshark itself provided to Universal." A complaint from Universal Media Group to Apple
Apple
The apple is the pomaceous fruit of the apple tree, species Malus domestica in the rose family . It is one of the most widely cultivated tree fruits, and the most widely known of the many members of genus Malus that are used by humans. Apple grow on small, deciduous trees that blossom in the spring...
is believed to be the reason behind Apple pulling the iPhone
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
app from its store after only a few days on Aug. 16, 2010.
In March 2010, Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd were an English rock band that achieved worldwide success with their progressive and psychedelic rock music. Their work is marked by the use of philosophical lyrics, sonic experimentation, innovative album art, and elaborate live shows. Pink Floyd are one of the most commercially...
sued EMI
EMI
The EMI Group, also known as EMI Music or simply EMI, is a multinational music company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the fourth-largest business group and family of record labels in the recording industry and one of the "big four" record companies. EMI Group also has a major...
, claiming that it has no right to sell their songs except as part of full albums because it reduced the albums' artistic integrity. Pink Floyd won against EMI, preventing the band's long-time record label from selling individual songs online, which prompted the band's removal from Grooveshark.
In April 1, 2011, the Grooveshark app was pulled, without their consent, from the Android Market.
See also
- List of social networking websites
- List of Internet stations
- List of online music databases
- Groupware
- Streaming mediaStreaming mediaStreaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a streaming provider.The term "presented" is used in this article in a general sense that includes audio or video playback. The name refers to the delivery method of the medium rather...
- Peer-to-peerPeer-to-peerPeer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
(P2P)