Big 4 Fall Out Over Grooveshark | Hacker News Reader

Big 4 Fall Out Over Grooveshark

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20 pointsinsomniamg7 comments

[W]hy have Universal decided to apply pressure at this point? Are they thinking like Grooveshark suspect, that they can bully their way into a deal with the streaming service without having to give away a rock bottom streaming royalty rate?

Unfounded speculation: maybe they've somehow found out that Grooveshark is finally making some decent money?

Or they have a lot of seed capital, and universal thinks why not take their money. My guess is that they haven't found a way to make much money from this arrangement. The bandwidth and storage costs alone can't be offset by advertising alone. VIP and pay for services are required. Now paying royalties for per play music makes this whole model very unworkable. The royalties imposed by the big 4 are a much more efficient way of preventing such models from taking shape than legal threats. So, legal threat -> resource starvation and legal thread -> royalty deal -> resource starvation. Same outcome, but the big 4 have more money now than doing just the legal route.

Maybe this is not completely on-topic, but checkout Voxound: www.voxound.com, they built a great online service as well as a desktop software (their main product), which helps you tag / classify all your music. It is truly useful and it doesn't violate any copyright laws.

I thought about them because of the quote from Mark Piibe in the article: “We think services like Grooveshark offer great music discovery options for fans,”. Voxound is an awesome music discovery tool.

Disclaimer: I am not related with Voxound, I just think they have a really good thing going on, and they only recently started.

I no longer store music locally on my computer; instead, Grooveshark runs 24/7. They have made my life much easier.

I wish they put up a "legal donations fund" so I could contribute.

I can see this happening more and more often in future, or at least I certainly hope so.

I'm genuinely surprised that it's taken so long for one of the major labels to express in public its displeasure with the lawsuit-first question-later bullying tactics. Have they only just done the accounts on costs of lawyers vs. income gained?

Does grooveshark pay royalties to companies other than EMI? From poking around their website, it looks as though a few college friends got together and decided to make a business out of blatantly ignoring music copyrights.

I'm sorry, I hate the RIAA as much as anybody else, but I have a tought time feeling bad for grooveshark.

I believe Grooveshark and similar services will truly be the future of music. With the web based mobile devices, it is possible for anyone to carry all music along with them instead of simply limiting themselves to the amount of MP3s they can store or afford. Their defense can be that they are simply Internet radio.

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