Grooveshark to shut down - make sure to close your account before they're off with your money

Update: Grooveshark has been bombarding us with threats to sue Side-Line since this post went online - weird that they hadn't time to respond to our article before it went online. The company also had their own personnel post harassing comments on this article. Very professional all this is.


We have heard from sources inside Grooveshark (a subsidiary of Escape Media Group) that the (illegal) streaming service is to shut down soon. Not surprising since the service has done nothing by the book since its start (not paying labels, artists but… letting users pay). With the explosive rise of legal services like Spotify, Rdio, Deezer etc offering a better experience it was just a matter of time before Grooveshark would realize the end was near.

We contacted Grooveshark for an official comment but as usual they ignored our request.

Noone in the music industry will shed a tear knowing that service closes its doors. For years now Side-Line heard from hundreds of bands and labels that Grooveshark was never paying them and even ignored the requests for takedown of the illegally obtained content. As of January 2012, Grooveshark has been sued for copyright-violations by all the major music companies, namely EMI Music Publishing, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music. Concerns about copyrights led Google, Apple and Facebook to remove Grooveshark's applications from Google Play, the App Store (iOS) and Facebook platform respectively.

If you have an account there, make sure to close it down and run for shelter to another - legal - service.

Posted by B. Van Isacker