Grooveshark clone rises from ashes of defunct music streaming site ~ lotfi

mardi 5 mai 2015

Grooveshark clone rises from ashes of defunct music streaming site

Grooveshark as we know it is dead, but a group has apparently reincarnated the music streaming service, albeit in a very murky manner.

Here's the deal: Four days ago, Grooveshark.com shut down after coming face-to-face with $736 million in copyright violation damages. Violate the terms of its settlement, and Grooveshark would need to cough up $75 million.

Grooveshark.com still has the company's announcement/apology message detailing the circumstances of its shut down and no sign of its user-uploaded tunes. But head over to Grooveshark.io, and it's like seeing a ghost.

How Grooveshark got its groove back

Jacob Siegal at BGR got an email today from someone calling himself "Shark." Shark was "connected" to Grooveshark a few years ago, according to another email sent to The Verge.

Shark revealed that along with an assembled team, he essentially cloned Grooveshark.com over to Grooveshark.io. The .io site is completely operational: users can go there right now to search, stream and download tracks, which include the very copyright-protected files that put the kibosh on Grooveshark.com.

The site quasi-lives again because Shark said he "started backing up all the content on the website when I started suspecting that Grooveshark's demise [was] close." Shark claims to have backed up 90% of Grooveshark.com's goods and is currently working on locking up the final percentage.

The idea is to recreate Grooveshark's UI on Grooveshark.io, but how long the site will be up and running remains to be seen. While it looks to cover itself with a righteous disclaimer page and claims to always show the page where a stream is indexed, we didn't find any instances of this during our own song and artist searches.

Given Grooveshark.com's decisive shutdown after years of legal battles, it's impossible not to question how long Grooveshark.io can last.

Shark had this to say to BGR about keeping the clone site up: "We have all the servers/domains infrastructure in place, it's going to be a roller coaster and we're ready for it."

We've contacted Grooveshark.io to learn more about the service. We'll update this this story if and when we hear back.