Introduction
Grooveshark is an internationally available online music search engine. It’s music streaming service allowing users to search for, stream, and upload music free of charge that can be played immediately or added to a playlist. Grooveshark streams 50 to 60 million songs per month, to more than 5,000,000 users.
How it works
When you log on to the site http://listen.grooveshark.com your greeted by a search box that allows you to find songs and play them instantly, building a queue in the process. When you are satisfied with the current list of songs in your queue, you are able to save the songs as a playlist that is saved to your profile. If you’re unable to think of all of the songs you like Grooveshark's "Grooveshark Radio" feature finds similar songs to those in a user's playlist and queues them for playback. Similar to Pandora's "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" feedback mechanism, users of Grooveshark can tell the recommendation system whether a particular recommendation was good or not by clicking a "happyface" or "sadface" icon. 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 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 sliding panels to categorize and display lists of information, similar in style to that of the 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 the files in the folders as MP3s and then saves them in the user library. 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. Once your library is uploaded to Grooveshark it is accessible by every member of Grooveshark. This however has raised concerns over the legality of this content with regards to copyright infringement. All content on the service is user-sourced.
Legal Issues
Grooveshark requires users to indemnify Escape Media Group for any losses, liabilities, damages, costs or expenses arising from any breach of the Terms of Service or any allegation that user uploaded content violates intellectual property rights just like YouTube and Vimeo.
Users have complained about the unbalanced indemnification protections found in Grooveshark's EULA. Despite these concerns, no user to date has faced legal action from Grooveshark or third-parties.
Parties in the USA claiming copyright infringement may use mechanisms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to request that their content be removed. Repeat offenders, users who have uploaded unlicensed content more than two times, have had their Grooveshark accounts suspended. Grooveshark makes a Label List available of all record labels with which they have royalty agreements, though in the past major record labels were noticeably absent. This changed on May 8, 2009 EMI filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Grooveshark, which was dropped on October 13, 2009 and replaced with a licensing deal.
Universal Music Group filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Grooveshark on January 6, 2010. This lawsuit is believed to have been the cause of Apple's pulling the Grooveshark application from iPhone in August 2010.
In March 2010, Pink Floyd sued EMI over the amount of royalties the band should receive for digital sales of their music, and as to whether tracks from their concept albums can be sold as singles. Pink Floyd won, and almost all of their tracks have been removed from Grooveshark.
References
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