Imagine for a second that you’re an artist and you write and perform a song. And you don’t want it sold or streamed in any way. You want to sell CDs. That’s it. This is America, and you have the right to do that.
This hack web site seems to think they can sell your music regardless of your wishes. They take money from suckers, and say that the only way to get it, is to sign a deal with them. Well forget that. THEY don’t own the music. They have no right to hold any escrow on it. Any lawyer anywhere will tell you this site is SOOO illegal it’s hilarious. If you download from it, YOU absolutely may be sued as well. Fair warning.

How many of your ‘most popular’ tracks in the Lite player are owned by these three? And how does the full-track on-demand streaming of all that content available in the player get accounted for in the royalties? I understand how someone buying a track for $0.99 = a royalty – but the streaming?

In my opinion, Pandora is the most useful tool we have at the moment, but that doesn’t mean others can’t help as well. I wish you guys the best of luck moving forward.

@Henry Crun: You’re right, we do hold payment in escrow for transactions of unlicensed content. We don’t touch it; it waits happily for its owner to come claim it. As for “fingerprinting” in Sharkbyte, it’s unnecessary! Track information must be pulled anyway during a transaction, so all meta-identification occurs server-side. None of it currently takes place in the client itself, except for basic methods of identifying new content against existing content already in the system.

@Adam Wexler: We definitely don’t claim to hold patent on sharing music with friends. We just believe that people go on the internet to communicate, to share, and to collaborate–especially when it comes to their passions. You’re right that everyone has an individual taste in music and that the long tail applies to most everyone, which is the *exact* reason Grooveshark is based on P2P technology. Pulling those unique tracks and tastes from a large group of people and making them easily available to everyone else is what we’re all about, and we’re constantly working on new ways to help you find what you might not know is out there.

@legality: We have licensing agreements with hundreds of labels–larger and smaller–and one of our biggest priorities is working with as many more as possible. Aside from our existing streaming deals with ASCAP, SESAC, and BMI, there are always discussions with labels both large and small, and there’s nothing we want to convey more to them than the fact that we *want* to get them paid. And we just sent out our first round of royalty checks not too long ago

We’re working as hard as possible to keep everything fast, fun, and stable. The TechCrunch Effect is not to be underestimated! Thanks to all you guys, please bear with us while we try to be awesome for you.

-Ben

Creating the ultimate playlist is great, but everybody has their own unique tastes. As Chris Anderson alluded to in The Long Tail, everybody’s taste departs from the “mainstream” at some point. Understanding that, let’s keep it simple: how can I best discover MY favorite music? I think I have the solution..

http://flex.org/

Mike Potter
Adobe Flex Product Marketing Team