Aurous: The Streaming Service The Music Industry Fears

The music industry hated Grooveshark because it never paid for the music it streamed, and it was finally able to shut it down earlier in the year. Now a new service called Aurous has appeared, immediately drawing the wrath of the RIAA in the form of a lawsuit.

Grooveshark worked as a shell on top of Google, which basically searched the web to find the songs (most of them illegally uploaded) you wanted to hear. Aurous works the same way, but instead uses the Torrents to find illegally uploaded song files. It's similar to Popcorn Time, which does the same thing for movies and television shows and currently has those industries scrambling.

Aurous has in interface that's very similar to Spotify, and features ad-free streaming, which also means that the copyright holder, the artists and songwriters aren't getting paid. The service debuted an alpha version last week.

The music industry was quick to react, showing just how much the site is feared.

On Monday, the RIAA on behalf of UMG, Sony Music, Warner Music, Atlantic and Capitol Records, filed a lawsuit against Aurous and its creator Andrew Sampson for "willful and egregious copyright infringement."

The problem is that Aurous operates as a decentralized BitTorrent search engine, and the company can argue that it's not hosting any illegal content.

This will be an interesting legal battle that's only just beginning.

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Grooveshark Won't Stay Closed

It didn't take long, but Grooveshark is back online just days after receiving orders to cease operations as a result of a lawsuit filed against it by the major record labels. The service can now be found at Grooveshark.io instead of ".com."

Apparently an employee of the company caught wind that the service might shut down before it happened and decided to back up the entire contents of the site and move it to a different offshore server.

As a result, he was able to reproduce the user interface, playlists and song catalog identically to the previous service.

In the short term this might not be that important, in but grand scheme of things it goes to show how difficult it is to shut down a pirate service.

Since Apple and the major record labels are trying to shut down the free tiers of the current streaming services, this serves as a warning. Piracy is going to rise again if those free tiers are eliminated, and it will more difficult than ever to close things down as pirates get more and more clever.

Grooveshark had about 20 million active users, which is about a third of Spotify. The difference is that the company never purchased a license to use the songs, or paid any royalties to artists and songwriters.

Considering how easy it is to get free music right now from legal streaming services, it does show that many people just don't want to trade their email address for the privilege of getting something free. It's a dilemma that we currently have live with in the business, but some form of this will probably always be with us.

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Grooveshark Shuts Down

If you enjoyed the free online music service Grooveshark at any time of the 8 years of its existence, you probably wondered about how it was able to stay in business. The service was basically a way to search for any song, then play it from within the Grooveshark player on your browser.

The big problem was that the service didn't license any of the material it played or pay royalties either, and as a result, the service was hit with a lawsuit that could have resulted in the company owing the record labels as much as $756 million.

That legal battle was finally found in favor of the labels, and as part of the settlement, Grooveshark has been shut down immediately. The company had as many as 20 million users, who must now look for a new music service.

In a statement on the company's website, it admitted that it had "made serious mistakes." "We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service,” it reads. “That was wrong. We apologize. Without reservation."

What's more, the company's founders are forbidden from starting a new music service under the threat of a $75 million fee for damages.

The technology to distribute music is easier to create than obtaining the necessary licenses to make it operate, which Grooveshark unfortunately discovered way too late. That's a main reason why technologists and venture money have been discouraged from entering the business in recent years.

Is that stifling innovation? Maybe, but it's more important that creators get paid at least something for their efforts whenever possible. Now if you could only find a way for more of it to find its way into the pockets of artists and songwriters and less into the label coffers.

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Streaming Service Grooveshark Gets Into Events

Grooveshark has always been one of the more interesting music streaming services in that it's always been a tiny outsider trying to stay competitive with the deep pockets of the industry. Starting as an alternative download service to iTunes in 2007, the company couldn't get much traction from the major record labels as far as licensing agreements. This lead to the service morphing into a more radio-like model that quickly ran afoul of a number of record labels, since licensing agreements were still not in place.

The company has since lost lawsuits filed by the major labels and even had its Facebook compatibility features pulled from its website and its Android app removed by Google.

None of this has stopped Grooveshark from trying new things though, and the latest is getting into events with Grooveshark Presents, a crowdsourced concert initiative that attempts to use the company's streaming data to help artists and promoters to better plan events.

The first concert occured on November 10th in Gainesville, Florida (where Grooveshark's corporate offices reside) with artists Autograf, Happy Accidents, and Bells & Robes.

Grooveshark.com currently calls itself a "Virtual DJ" allowing the user to broadcast a playlist, which is a great idea, except for the fact that artists and labels claim they're not being paid.

While Grooveshark is appealing its loses in court, it continues to try to stay relevant. The fact that it has 30 million monthly users is pretty impressive, but it still remains to be seen whether this new niche will ultimately be enough to keep the company alive over the long term in the face of continuing industry pressure.

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Why The Grooveshark Ruling Should Scare YouTube

Grooveshark is the music streaming service that everyone uses at least sometimes, but gets no respect, especially from the music industry. In fact, Grooveshark has been laden with lawsuits from the major labels over the last few years over users uploading copyrighted songs illegally, a fact that has weighed the company down significantly.

Despite having a healthy 30 million users a month, the service has been struggling with cashflow thanks to the legal hassles that the suits entailed. Things just got worse for the company when a 5 judge panel of the New York Supreme Court overturned a previous ruling and concluded that any song created before 1972 that was uploaded to the service should have the same "safe harbor" protections offered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as a song written after 1972.

What that means is that not only must Grooveshark remove any copyrighted song from that period if given notice of infringement by the controller of the copyright, but that it can also be charged as a party to the infringement as well. This, of course, opens the company up to all sorts of potential lawsuits that can bring an already struggling company to its knees.

While Grooveshark is clearly the focus of this suit and controversy, it also brings the same type of scrutiny to YouTube and all other video sites however, a fact that should be making them extremely nervous about now.

Now the saving grace for YouTube in all this is that so far this is a lawsuit based in New York, where Grooveshark does business, and each state has their own interpretations of the same law, but a precedent has been set.

Google has some mighty deep pockets that can hold their own in just about any legal fight, but you know that this is not a fight that they need or want. Copyright holders might see this as another source of income however, one that they might feel has rightfully eluded them for many years, and move along a new round of legal action based upon the ruling quickly.

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Will The RIAA Make You Register Your Domain?

As you might already know, there are a variety of new domain extensions (the .com or .net on the end of a URL) about to be approved and ".music" will be one of them. While this seems like it's perfect for an artist, band or company involved in music, there may be a hidden catch, thanks to  a number of industry trade organizations.

The fact is the matter is that the RIAA, Soundexchange, the Recording Academy, ASCAP, and 38 other organizations want to be the keeper of all things .music. The problem with this is that you'll have to register with them before you're issued your .music domain, and with that comes some potential problems.

First of all, they want to make sure that you're really part of the music community before they grant the domain. No problem there, since that's what the extension is for in the first place.

The problem is that any number of things can cause you to be rejected, or even work, have your domain revoked after the fact. What if you're suspected of engaging in piracy? What if you frequent a site or even post music on Grooveshark (which is locked in legal battles with the RIAA as we speak)? What if, for whatever reason, you're deemed to be not a member of the "musical community?" Does that mean a garage band who can't draw more than 10 people to a gig risks getting their domain revoked? What if you've only sold less than a hundred downloads?

The potential for abuse outweighs the upside of having an industry gatekeeper. There are several other entities that are vying for power over the extension as well. Let's hope that it remains free just like .com, .net, .org, .tv, .us, and all the other extensions in common use today.

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Grooveshark's Beluga Analytics

This week beleaguered Grooveshark released its free analytics tool called "Beluga." It's an interesting tool for researching the demographics and music habits of the people listening to a particular artist. Even better, it's free.

What's more, you can even dig deep into the culture and lifestyle, socioeconomics and product affinities of the listeners. And it's free.

Culture and lifestyle provide answers to questions like:

Do you own any of the following gaming systems?
What languages do you speak?
What kind of pets do you own?
How many children live in your home?

Socioeconomics questions include:

What's your current employment status?
What's your annual income?
What cellphone network do you use?
What brands of credit/debit cards do you use?

Not enough? How about some product affinity info like:

What kind of gaming system do you use?
What kind of insurance do you currently have?
What bank do you currently use?
Do you use any of the following websites?

So exactly how does Grooveshark get all of this info just from streaming some music? They've actually been offering opt-in surveys to their users for a while, which allows them to collect a tremendous amount of data on the listener if he/she chooses to answer the questions.

Why is Beluga a free service? On their FAQ page, they'll give you a mumbo-jumbo non-answer, but the underlying reason is that Grooveshark knows it's in trouble in the streaming business, facing some stiff competition from services like Pandora and Spotify as well as the wrath of the major record labels. There's a lot more money to be made in data collection, so Grooveshark is actually positioning itself for life after music streaming, as I see it.

What's the achilles heel? If an artist isn't on Grooveshark, there's no way to determine any information about their listeners. The Beatles aren't represented on the service, so there's no demographic data available as a result.

That said, it's a pretty cool tool if you're an artist and you're on the service (By the way, Grooveshark is about to release an artist's upload tool that will make that easier in the future). By no means do you get a complete picture of your listeners, but it's another piece of the puzzle. Did I mention that it's free (at least for now)? Check out Beluga here.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Look Out For Anontune

I don't know how I feel about this. The infamous Anonymous hacker activist group has launched a new social music streaming service called Anontune. The service is free and allows you to listen to music from multiple sources. It's similar to Grooveshark in that it doesn't host any of the music files itself; it simply searches for them on YouTube, Soundcloud and other sites, and will reportedly add MySpace and Yahoo as well as other sources soon.

According to the video that describes Anontune (which you can see below), "Anontune will never host any copyrighted music at any time, nor will it be streaming music. Rather than focus on the music itself, Anontune will instead focus upon information about the music. Information like were music is being distributed, how it is being used, and how it is discovered."

Anyone can try the service right now, although it's still reportedly pretty buggy. Security experts and copyright attorneys have also cautioned that it's probably a good idea to stay away, but it's at least something that you should be aware of.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.

Most Popular Music Websites - Part 2

Yesterday we saw the numbers of the most popular music websites, today we look at those numbers graphically. Here's how the most popular music sites stack up against one another. Green indicates positive growth; Red indicates negative growth.




Looks impressive doesn't it. Playlist.com has more traffic than last.fm and Grooveshark, which both have more traffic than the other contenders. But the following chart shows you the real picture as we see how these are dwarfed by Pandora, and annihilated by YouTube.


Really puts things into perspective, doesn't it. Without a doubt, YouTube is the single most widely used website for music discovery and distribution. And by the way, you won't be making enough from it to buy more than that burger at Micky D's unless you have millions of plays (and it's not much even then).

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.

Mulve - The Music Industry's Worst Nightmare

As reported yesterday on Hypebot, a new program called Mulve allows free streaming of songs directly to a user's desktop quickly and easily. Since P2P isn't involved, this means that the user doesn't have to worry about uploading, viruses, or "getting caught." And since it's free, the price is right (at least for the user).

While this might be great for music consumers, it's potentially horrible for music creators and distributors. Getting music for free means, of course, that no one gets paid. An indie artist won't care if following in the Music 3.0 footsteps where music product is treated as marketing, but it cuts right at the core of  the income streams of publishers and record labels.

This isn't the first free streaming service and it probably wont be the last. Grooveshark is another service that does somewhat the same thing, as it searches the web for the title that your looking for, then provies a number of choices for you to play. Eventually the RIAA legal team is all over these services, so enjoy them while you can.

You don't have to register for Mulve, and only need to download a 2MB zip file that includes the installer itself and a text file regarding donations. Note that it's PC only at this time, so Mac heads still must use Grooveshark or, if you want to pay, iTunes.

Here is how the creators describe Mulve and themselves:

"Originating from computer adept backgrounds, two guys, both musicians, met one day. After a drink, it was final, they decided to start developing a program like no other, something that would allow people to find a tune they wanted, no slower than a click of a button.

Mulve, is just that program. After years of development we wanted to bring you something that you would enjoy loading up, something that was not for personal gain or for money. Something that could run flawlessly without so much as a momentary hiccup. Something that would prove to be a monumental breakthrough in terms of music discovery."

Mulve seems to be both amazingly simple to use and untrackable. Here's the official video demo:

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Follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.

Check out my Big Picture blog for discussion on common music, engineering and production tips and tricks.