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.
1 comment:
Stop stealing artist's music you cheapskate, disrespectful a-holes!
If you like it and want it, buy it. Shoplifting music is the same as shoplifting in any store.
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