All good things must come to an end. It appears that Grooveshark was pulled from the App Store. We sent Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Josh Greenberg a note about it and he replied that the crew are now scrambling to figure out what's going on. No word yet on what really happened or why Grooveshark had their app pulled.
The Mac|Life staff members are big fans of the music streaming app and are sad to see them go from the App Store. But once we hear more, we'll keep you posted. Grooveshark has published an official blog post about what has happened to their iPhone app. The company stated the following:
"Earlier this afternoon, Apple sent us a letter notifying us that, due to a complaint they received from Universal Music Group UK, Grooveshark for iPhone has been, strangely, pulled from the App Store.
This comes as an absolute surprise to us, and we are not sleeping until we figure out exactly how to fix this—and get Grooveshark for iPhone back in the App Store. Above all, our biggest concern is damaging the service we provide to all of you guys—our loyal (awesome) users."
Grooveshark added that if you were one of the lucky few that managed to download the app before it was pulled, you should "keep enjoying it." The company is also working hard on bringing the Grooveshark service to other app stores as well, like BlackBerry, Android, Palm WebOS and Symbian.
Follow this article's author, Florence Ion, on Twitter.
ilikeimac
August 17, 2010 at 2:14pm
Aha. They do have a system for compensating artists when their music is played, and they honor DMCA takedown requests. Still, given the massive amounts of music on there (and the number of duplicates/misspellings) I'm guessing that the majority is unauthorized and most copyright owners will find it unacceptable to need to file a takedown request for each and every copy that crops up.
More info: http://www.grooveshark.com/dmca
ilikeimac
August 17, 2010 at 11:04am
At first Grooveshark appears to be a Pandora-like streaming service: they stream customize playlists with ads, or for a fee you can have an ad-free stream.
But take a second look and you see that Grooveshark gets all that music from user uploads, and pays no royalties to anyone to stream it. The onus is on users to upload only music to which they own the copyright. Naturally users have uploaded tons of copyrighted music, and hence a music label is now upset.
Here's a snippet of the Terms of Service:
Prohibited User Content includes but is not limited to content that […] consists of an illegal or unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work, such as sound recordings, musical compositions and videos in which you do not personally own the copyright (including CDs and tracks you may have purchased), or otherwise do not have the necessary authority from the copyright owner(s).
ilikeimac
August 17, 2010 at 11:52am
I posted a question/statement similar to the comment above on their blog and they deleted it.
Correction: It just got modded down or something, so it moved down the page.
