According to Chilean tech blog FayerWayer, music startup Grooveshark is about to announce that it has reached an agreement with recording industry giant The EMI Group. The news comes nearly three months after EMI sued the fledgling company behind the service, Escape Media Group, for infringement on its copyright.
Grooveshark is a web-based music application where you can go to listen to music on-demand, at no charge. Users get access to individual songs from a 7-million strong track catalog, save playlists, and embed both on other websites, blogs, and social media profiles via the Grooveshark Widget.
In addition, Grooveshark allows both artists and record labels to promote themselves through the application with ads and pay-per-listen campaigns.
Grooveshark has a paid VIP version with some exclusive features, and a special interface for users who cough up $3 per month (or $30 a year).
Under the fresh deal, Grooveshark users will gain access to content from EMI’s roster of current and legendary catalog artists and EMI Music Publishing’s songwriters.
Grooveshark CEO Sam Tarantino said:
“EMI Music and EMI Music Publishing have collaborated with us to create a mutually sustainable deal which represents the future of digital music. We will continue to deliver the best music service on the Internet to our users, and we will expand our capacity to strengthen fan-to-artist connections through our technology.”
The terms for the licensing agreement, which extends to the United States only, remain undisclosed. I daresay it was most likely a good deal for EMI and less so for Grooveshark.
If Grooveshark now manages to sign up the other majors too, it stands a chance to become the ‘Spotify in the U.S.’ before Spotify actually crosses the pond. But if its model will prove to be sustainable remains to be seen.
Grooveshark is great. EMI is not.
Grooveshark rocks.
I count a number of Grooveshark’s founding employees among my friends, and despite my initial skepticism toward the service, I’m really glad to see they’ve persisted through the doubts of the last few years and emerged to a new level of adoption and legitimacy.
Congrats guys! This is great news.
Best,
The Blip.fm Crew
EMI=The Beatles
For the first time I’m listening to Penny Lane online and legit
Cool
Yet again, another startup is sucking up to “The Man”.
Yeah, they really had a choice in the matter
Is it me, or does this article come off kind of cynical? The terms shouldn’t be important here. The news that Grooveshark made a positive move for their company and a positive move for music fans, should be the focus. It’s a step forward, let’s run with that.
Awesome! Good move for everyone. Now we just need music services to start including BPM in the meta data.
http://www.cadenceapp.com
Thanks for the writeup!
Also, thanks for the nice words Jeff!
Cool – Congrats Dudes! It’s no fun receiving legal papers from hungry entertainment lawyers.
the jamWee.com staff
awesome! this is a very cool site, I use it all the time
I too use Grooveshark on occasion. Not a big fan of the klunky interface (i don’t care how iphony you make it, it’s not helping the experience). I’m happy to see that there’s a future for the service!
Any thoughts why this is working out differently from the fortunes of http://seeqpod.com ? Is this working out because Grooveshark has demonstrated revenue potential? Is there something different in the way the apps work (grooveshark kinda hides the original source of the mp3 – seeqpod didn’t)? Or is this just a bizdev/relationship success?
CG
http://greacen.com
http://twitter.com/greacen
I’m glad someone pointed out that the interface sucks. It looks quite pretty, but the usability is terrible. Seeqpod’s playlist navigator was much better — it was possible to actually see what the song’s were in the playlist. I use grooveshark though, as I cannot find any alternatives.
I imagine grooveshark just has better timing; the music companies seem to just be giving up on suing every web 2.0 music search company and are just making deals (spotify as well comes to mind)