Grooveshark — The Free Jukebox That Was Built on Songs It Never Licensed

Grooveshark was a free music-streaming service where users uploaded the songs, and on April 30, 2015 it shut down overnight as the price of a legal settlement — admitting infringement, surrendering everything it owned, to escape damages that could have run past $700 million. Launched in March 2006 by three University of Florida undergraduates, Andrés Barreto, Josh Greenberg, and Sam Tarantino, and run through Escape Media Group, Grooveshark let anyone upload an audio file and stream anything in the library for nothing, supported by ads. It was, for years, one of the easiest ways on the internet to play almost any song instantly.

That ease was its appeal and its original sin. Grooveshark’s catalog — at its height the company claimed over 15 million songs, more than a billion streams a month, and around 20 million users — was assembled largely from files its users uploaded, very few of them licensed. The service leaned on the legal shelter that protects platforms from what their users post. The labels argued, and ultimately proved, that Grooveshark was not a passive host but an active participant: its own employees had been instructed to upload copyrighted recordings as a condition of employment.

The litigation was long and, once that fact emerged, lopsided. Universal Music Group sued in 2010; a nine-label coalition including Sony, Warner, and Arista followed in 2011. In September 2014 a federal judge in New York granted summary judgment, finding Escape liable for direct and secondary infringement over thousands of recordings. With statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work and 4,907 works at issue, the company faced a theoretical $736 million in liability — an extinction-level number for a startup.

So Grooveshark settled to survive being erased rather than be bankrupted by a verdict. On April 30, 2015 it ceased operations immediately, posted a public apology, wiped its catalog, and handed its website, apps, and intellectual property to the record companies. It is the cleanest illustration in this catalog of a simple rule: a service whose product is other people’s copyrighted work, taken without permission, is not a business with a legal problem — it is a lawsuit that happens to stream music.