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Filed under: Audio, News, Social Software

Grooveshark faces lawsuit from EMI


I'm a big fan of the streaming music site Grooveshark. It's a great way to listen to practically any song and share new music with friends. EMI doesn't have any love for Grooveshark, though: the label is suing the service. It's not clear what the claims in the suit are, yet, but Grooveshark's side of the story is that they were negotiating some kind of licensing deal with the major labels, and EMI sued as a negotiating tactic.

I can see why a label would want to sue Grooveshark. According to one small label that's done business with them, Grooveshark just uses the labels' content to pay its bills, and offers little to nothing in advertising revenue in return. On the other hand, I don't know too many people who use Grooveshark as a replacement for buying a legitimate digital download of a song. You need to be online to listen, and you can't put streaming tracks on your iPod, so it hardly seems like an equivalent product.

I selfishly hope Grooveshark survives this lawsuit, because I enjoy being able to preview full tracks before I buy them. I also enjoy sharing music with my friends by embedding Grooveshark widgets or using the Facebook plugin, and maybe those friends will hear something they like and go buy an album. If I were the music industry right now, I might take those sales where I could get them.

[via AllThingsD]

Major label economics forces Sonific to the wall

SonificSonific, the Web based music distribution system that brought you SongSpots, is set to close on May 1. Sonific worked by allowing users to embed 'SongSpots' in Web sites, individual flash widgets that play individual songs on demand. The service targeted social media sites and bloggers who could augment their sites with tracks without additional software or servers.

In a statement on the Sonific Web site, founder Gerd Leonhard, said that the economics of the music industry made it impossible for Sonific to continue with its current business model. Leonhard pointed to the attitude of major labels as one of the key issues in developing the service, noting that the Majors would often make unreasonable demands to license their music, 'we have routinely faced demands for very large cash advances and fixed per-stream minimum payments, pressure to give them 'free' company equity, and requirements of utterly bizarre usage restrictions.'

According to Leonhard the site had around 80,000 registered users and had managed to aggregate over 200,000 songs from independent labels and music aggregators, but had found it difficult in the current business environment to carve out a realistic business model for the service.

According to Leonhard's statement 'the bottom line is that this industry is certifiably dysfunctional and that we do not see a plausible path to take at this time. We neither want to engage in so-called copyright infringement nor do we have millions of dollars available to buy our way in when it is abundantly clear that doing business under the existing rules of the major labels will simply amount to economic suicide.

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