Following A Good Legal Shakedown, Grooveshark Shuts Its Doors

One of the oldest and most successful music streaming services, Grooveshark, has just shut down. The cease of operations comes out of nowhere, but the surprise doesn’t: the service was a haven for listening to unlicensed music. When I took the service for a spin after its last major update, I was told by the company that it couldn’t promote the article because screenshots I included had unlicensed artists. That about says it all.

Despite the sketchy nature of the service, I considered it to be amazing for what it was. More than any other music streaming service I’ve used, I found it to do a splendid job of giving me fresh music to listen to that was relevant to my interests. Sure, it played the same song a little too often sometimes, but it was almost guaranteed to be a good one.

Alas, the service will never reach its full potential, as it’s now in possession of the record industry. So too is Grooveshark’s mobile apps, patents, copyrights, and other IP.

Visiting the site now, a quick explanation is given, along with some suggestions of alternative services:

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 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 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.

At the time of our launch, few music services provided the experience we wanted to offer – and think you deserve. Fortunately, that’s no 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 great music together. Thank you for being such passionate fans.

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

As unfortunate as Grooveshark’s demise may be, we’re fortunate to at least have myriad of other options out there. While I used Grooveshark for a while after the aforementioned article, I went on to other services, namely Spotify, once it arrived in Canada. Given all of the legal services that are available right now, it’s almost a wonder why it took this long for Grooveshark to shut down.

Nonetheless, RIP, Grooveshark.