Things are not looking good for Grooveshark. The controversial music streaming site has been banned from the major mobile app stores and is in the process of being sued by Universal Music Group for copyright infringement. Yes, that's the same UMG that apparently thinks its right to remove content from the Internet goes beyond what it actually owns.
But this week, the label was joined by a few of its industry allies in its fight against Grooveshark. Sony and Warner Music Group are piling on and joining the lawsuit against the service. Since UMG's lawsuit was filed, leaked emails and blog comments from purported Grooveshark employees have shined new light on the extent of the alleged infringement.
In the fast-changing digital music streaming space, it's hard to know which service is best for you. Spotify gets the most hype, but lots of people love Rdio, which has solid backing and a huge library of music. There are also beloved underdogs like MOG and Grooveshark.
When it comes to choosing which option to go for, the most you can do is take each service for a spin, run a couple searches for stuff you like and see what comes up. You can get a general feeling of which one's a better fit and go with your gut, but wouldn't some hard data be nice?
In a potential abuse of YouTube's system for reporting copyright infringement, Universal Music succeeded yesterday in having a pro-file-sharing song removed from the site. The kicker? Universal evidently does not have any legal claim to the rights of the song or any of its contents.
The track was commissioned by file-sharing site Megaupload as part of a campaign to generate support for the controversial service. It features several mainstream artists, including Snoop Dogg, Kanye West and P Diddy, praising the service, which happens to be one of many thorns in the sides of major music executives everywhere.
Normally when a tech company launches a product or feature that's billed as a potential "killer" of a popular incumbent, there's cause to be skeptical. Quite often, that's just unsubstantiated hype either on the part of the company itself or tech writers.
In the case of Spotify's new Web radio feature, we're not going to go so far as to say that it's a "Pandora killer," but its inclusion in Spotify's desktop client is going to give the up-and-coming streaming service a tangible advantage over the 11-year-old Web radio service.
These days, with the traditional structures of the music industry blown wide open by the Internet, artists are constantly looking for new ways to market themselves and, if at all possible, earn money in the process. From streaming services to DIY online marketing tools, there's seemingly no limit to the digital tools available to musicians these days.
One such tool, StageIt, is hoping to put an innovative spin on live performances by bringing them online.
This week, darling of the all-you-can-stream music space Spotify announced that it's opening up to third party developers and creating a platform on which they can build HTML5 apps to run within its desktop client. Once approved by Spotify, those apps will be available to users from the service's new "App Finder" button. They've also added a new home screen that show's what music is trending among one's friends, as well as an improved social experience all around.
The new features are not yet included in the Spotify desktop client, but curious users can download a preview of the next version of the software. We did and after using it, we're finding that the inclusion of third party apps makes Spotify much better.
I'll never forget when I first discovered Napster. I was in high school and had heard about it from a friend. As an avid music fan, I was delighted to suddenly find myself with access to a seemingly limitless trove of songs, some of which were previously available only on $40 CD-R bootlegs in the back of record shops where they also sold paraphernalia strictly designed for smoking tobacco and only tobacco.
I never abandoned purchasing music all together, but the MP3 struck me as a far more convenient format than the compact disc, and Napster gave me quick and easy access to a world of MP3's. When Radiohead's "Kid A" showed up on Napster weeks before the CD was available in stores, what was I supposed to do? Ignore it?
Music has been a huge part of the Web since the days when Geocities-hosted fan sites offered Nirvana MIDI files and 15-second clips of songs in WAV format. A decade ago, we saw the rise and fall of Napster, the remnants of which were recently sold yet again. From the ashes of Napster rose a new era of digital music, fueled in large part by the iPod and iTunes Music Store. The traditional structures of the music industry may never return to what they once were, and that's okay. Today we have access to more music than ever before and the tools for creating it are available to anyone who can afford a laptop.
Music is still a huge - and growing - part of the Web today. This year, we watched a number of trends unfold in the digital music space. Picking the five most significant was no easy task, but we manage to narrow it down. This space is still evolving, and we can only imagine how it will look another decade from now.
All-you-can-stream music service Spotify is letting third party developers expand on its functionality using its API. It is offering the results to users in a new HTML5 app directory, CEO Daniel Ek announced today in New York.
Developers have already built apps with features like the ability to find and purchase concert tickets, the means to display a song's lyrics on-screen through TuneWiki and deeper Last.fm integration for better music recommendations.
The music streaming site Grooveshark is no stranger to the ire of the music industry. The service's approach to hosting and streaming songs has resulted in a barrage of criticism from industry players, as well as a handful of lawsuits.
The latest lawsuit is actually the second one to be filed by Universal Music Group, the biggest of the major record companies. This time, UMG is suing over a claim that Grooveshark employees were required to bulk-upload music files to the service, and even got a monetary bonus for beating their upload quota. The lawsuit demands $150,000 per alleged infringement, which works out to about $17 billion, as Digital Music News points out.
