The site is just an image with small text, so I've transcribed it here;
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Dear music fans,
Today we are shutting down Grooveshark.
We started out nearly ten years ago with the goal of helping fans share and discover music. But despite the best of intentions, we made very serious mistakes. We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service.
That was wrong. We apologize.
Without reservation.
As part of the settlement agreement with the major record companies, we have agreed to cease operations immediately, wipe clean all of the record companies’ copyrighted works and hand over ownership of this website, our mobile apps and intellectual property, including our patents and copyrights.
At the time of our launch, few music services provided the experience we wanted to offer - and think you deserve. Fortunately, that’s not longer the case. There are now hundreds of fan friendly, affordable services available for you to choose from, including Spotify, Deezer, Google Play, Beats Music, Rhapsody and Rdio, among many others.
If you love music and respect the artists, songwriters and everyone else who makes great music possible, use a licensed service that compensates artists and other rights holders. You can find out more about the many great services available where you live here:
http://whymusicmatters.com/find-music.
It has been a privilege getting to know so many of you and enjoying music together. Thank you for being such passionate fans.
Yours in music,
Your friends at Grooveshark
April 30, 2015
As part of the settlement agreement with the major record companies,
we have agreed to cease operations immediately, wipe
clean all of the record companies’ copyrighted works and
hand over ownership of this website, our mobile apps and
intellectual property, including our patents and copyrights.
Yeah Grooveshark was really getting in the way of me paying for that album ($10) and song ($1.something) I paid for in the last couple of days.
Oh and that $1 song? I bought it because I heard it on one of those videos-that-is-really-just-a-still-frame-so-they-can-share-the-music for the song. Also, what is Grooveshark again? I've heard of it, but I don't think I've ever used it.
My experiences can't be atypical, can they? Was it really a threat worth shutting down and all of the legal expenses? This just hurts me because literally in the last couple of days I watched an unlicensed copy of a song, liked it, and then bought it because I could and I wanted better quality sound. The (different) album was a similar pipeline--A link on Reddit directed me to the song (in the form of a YouTube video) and I then ended up buying the album.
I don't remember the last time I bought an album or song, but I use streaming music services all the time. Same goes for anyone I know. Admittedly anecdotal but then again so is your assertion.
I find that interesting because I mostly use streaming services to find music I buy. Largely because I've yet to use a streaming service that handles intermittent connectivity well enough (you'd think that my commute from a densely populated London suburb, along one of the highest density commuter routes in Europe, in to Central London would have decent mobile data coverage, wouldn't you... But you'd be sadly mistaken) to be worth using most of the time. Also because most of them are really quite horrible at picking tracks I want to listen to at any given time overall....
I couldn't imagine relying on those services for most of my listening.
Largely because I've yet to use a streaming service that handles intermittent connectivity well enough
If you have an Android phone: Google Play All Access.
You can offline content to your phone as if you own the music, but you get full access to their complete library. It's pretty brilliant, IMO.
Edit: though that doesn't help you if you're looking for a radio-like service... I tend to listen to albums at a time, and discover artists through third party services (e.g., Rate Your Music) that then drive me to sample stuff on Play. So it works well for me.
Once I've decided I like something, I tend to want to actually own it.. Play's opaqueness when it comes to telling me what's DRMd and what isn't (may very well have changed - I haven't bothered checking in a very long time, and to be honest I don't know whether they've ever had DRMd music at all, because their lack of transparency with respect to video content and ebooks mean I never bothered even looking at their music section) has kept me away from using it at all for content.
Google Play's radio feature has been amazing in my experience, and way better than Spotify's. Especially for stuff which is a little bit out of the mainstream, the selection-quality is so high that I wouldn't be surprised if they were using some of their Google suggestion-fu to generate it from what tracks users have played together in the past.
Oh yeah, my only point is offlining/intermittent connectivity and the radio features are kind of at odds with one another... but that's not unique to Google in any way.
How do you buy an album or song without it being DRM-chained to a particular service? That's my problem with music. I've settled on Spotify for this reason, but I was extremely disappointed to read that I'm probably not contributing in any meaningful way to the less-than-popular artists I listen to.
(But then I'm one of the people who grew up buying music, I've got ~1,200 albums on vinyl and ~5000 on CD as a testament to my music purchasing past...)
It had the exact opposite effect for me. I used Spotify for a couple of years and basically only listened to the same playlists over and over again. Only when they forced people to use Facebook to log in I stopped paying and using their service and suddenly a whole new world oppened for me. I started using SoundCloud, Jammendo and YouTube to find new music from outside of the mainstream and never looked back.
This was four years ago, in the meantime i built up my private music library mostly with Vinyl + MP3 download codes and went all the way to mimic Spotifies technical solutions and can stream my library from a Raspberry Pi at home https://jeena.net/private-music-streaming
I listen to BBC Radio 6 for new music (mainly Lauren Laverne) and the blogged 50 radio on Google Play. When I hear something I like I just add it in google Play.
Spotify didn't stop you from finding new music, your own habits/place you were in in life did that. I went through a phase of only listening to all my existing mp3s for a few years, but the last year has been an orgy of new stuff.
I wouldn't attribute it to listening/not listening to a streaming service.
Google Play slightly annoys me at times, the app is pretty horribly designed and slow at times, but spotify was blocked on a network I regularly used and I'm used to its quirks now.
I don't buy music any more. At the moment there's simply no point with a Google Play subscription. The only band I've noticed missing is Placebo's old albums.
It has no random feature, the channels they offer are either hand crafted or based on popularity. The music selection excludes many smaller, and indie, labels. The search functionalities are very limited (the metadata is too low quality).
I wanted to love Spotify, and I really gave it a try. I just couldn't keep using it, all it did for me was to make me angry. In the end it's mostly good for listening to what the major labels think you should listen.
I have personally found Spotify's Browse>Discover feature to be be useful and worthy, I've found a lot of interesting music in there.
My use case though is that I most often go on Spotify to listen to a specific album I had in mind, either I knew already or heard of it from a friend, blog, local gig, etc. But those times (20% maybe?) I feel like trying something new, I always find something good on Discover.
I wish their UI was better though. The desktop app spawns 7 SpotifyHelper processes that each eat 40mb of RAM and the whole thing feels way slow on my 10ish year laptop. The web app uses flash, and while it consumes less ram, the playback is choppy on my pc. At least the desktop app plays fine once it's started.
"If you love music and respect the artists, songwriters and everyone else who makes great music possible, use a licensed service that compensates artists and other rights holders."
It seems so easy compensate that second group that I work harder breathing each day. That first group, it seems like I could get a message to mars easier than to send them a whole dollar.
To be fair, companies such as Bandcamp are making this easier every day. If you're an artist and want to be directly paid by your fans, it is becoming easier every day. However I agree that a big part of the industry is still very opaque (including services like Spotify, unfortunately)
Can somebody verify this? I'm one who used Groove Shark to discovered music that I really like and then bought it in an effort to support the musician (thanks big music, you just took away one of your means of extracting money out of me).
I would happily wear the t-shirt if I knew that it was in fact the most direct route to actually transfer money to the musician.
I was a professional musician for 15 years. After having kids, the amount of time that I would've had to spend on the road playing and selling t shirts would've far outweighed the time I would've had to be home raising them, so I started teaching myself development in the tour bus. That was 7 years ago.
My old band is still out there, selling out Red Rocks, and any of their merch that you can buy at the show has the highest margin of anything. This is true for every band from John Mayer to the Avett Brothers to your local Dead cover band.
So help me God, buy a shirt at the show or on their website.
First Groovy gets its development funding pulled and hosting infrastructure shut down, now 3 months later Grooveshark does the same. It's not a good year for anything named Groov* in the startup space!
It doens't sound like a letter the CEO would write -- it appears to be mostly reflective of the opinion/perspective of those that won the lawsuit and took over the site.
What is the difference, if you don't mind me asking? How does the use of an image instead of text make it seem like it's not actually from Grooveshark?
---
Dear music fans,
Today we are shutting down Grooveshark.
We started out nearly ten years ago with the goal of helping fans share and discover music. But despite the best of intentions, we made very serious mistakes. We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service.
That was wrong. We apologize. Without reservation.
As part of the settlement agreement with the major record companies, we have agreed to cease operations immediately, wipe clean all of the record companies’ copyrighted works and hand over ownership of this website, our mobile apps and intellectual property, including our patents and copyrights.
At the time of our launch, few music services provided the experience we wanted to offer - and think you deserve. Fortunately, that’s not longer the case. There are now hundreds of fan friendly, affordable services available for you to choose from, including Spotify, Deezer, Google Play, Beats Music, Rhapsody and Rdio, among many others.
If you love music and respect the artists, songwriters and everyone else who makes great music possible, use a licensed service that compensates artists and other rights holders. You can find out more about the many great services available where you live here: http://whymusicmatters.com/find-music.
It has been a privilege getting to know so many of you and enjoying music together. Thank you for being such passionate fans.
Yours in music, Your friends at Grooveshark April 30, 2015
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Source at https://denpa.moe/~syrup/grooveshark-notice.txt