Closing the Gate

A year ago I wrote an "I'd Like to Make a Request" post about the Grooveshark.com music streaming service: therein I noted that Grooveshark has been sued by all of the major music companies. As you may know, Grooveshark shut down at the end of April: the legal walls were closing in on it and its proprietors decided, wisely no doubt, to cut their losses and run. As I did a lot of music listening at Grooveshark I thought I would write a brief 'post-mortem' about the situation.

To recap, I viewed Grooveshark as an end run around radio gatekeepers who at best have deeply parochial musical tastes and at worst don't care about music at all, i.e., it was a place to seek out deep cuts and other music that ordinarily wouldn't get played on the radio. In this regard my Grooveshark listening highlights included:

• Miles Davis's Get Up with It in its entirety
• All four parts of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music
• "Sister Ray" from the Velvet Underground's White Light/White Heat
• Big chunks of Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby
• "The Fountain of Lamneth" from Rush's Caress of Steel
• "An Index of Metals" from Fripp & Eno's Evening Star
• "Wild Women with Steak-Knives (The Homicidal Love Song for Solo Scream)" from Diamanda Galás's The Litanies of Satan
• Selected selections by Glenn Branca

Ah, much better than "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough", "Don't Stop Believin'", or "Blank Space", wouldn't you say?

I'll admit that my time at Grooveshark was not always spent 'productively': I often visited the site at night and opted to listen to old favorites because I was too tired to be adventurous. I did what I could.

Not with a bang

I can tell you the last song I listened to at Grooveshark: on 30 April at 12:29 PM (right before lunch) I streamed Fleetwood Mac's "Storms", which originally appeared on Tusk and which I have never heard on the radio and which is IMO a better song than the Fleetwood Mac songs that do get airplay (I'd make an exception for "Sara", also from Tusk, but it's been quite some time since I've heard "Sara" on the radio). If the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) were willing to pressure radio stations to play "Storms" instead of "Go Your Own Way" or "The Chain" then I might have some sympathy for its complaints about Grooveshark, but it isn't.

When I returned to the site at 9:44 PM that night it was all over: the site's proprietors had put up a .png image of a farewell message
(a-b) announcing the shutdown and providing a summary thereof and
(c) exhorting its users to seek out a licensed service that compensates artists and other rights holders: toward this end it advertises an RIAA-affiliated whymusicmatters.com/find-music music service portal.
The message is still in place as of this writing.

Meanwhile, a http://grooveshark.li/ site has popped up: I've tested its search engine with a variety of songs and can report that its library comes nowhere close to that of the original site (you won't find "Storms" there, BTW).

FYI: A search for http://grooveshark.com/ at the Internet Archive generates a Page cannot be crawled or displayed due to robots.txt. error.

Exodus

As it happens, I was in the process of migrating my music listening from Grooveshark to YouTube at the time of Grooveshark's demise anyway. The quality of the Grooveshark service had deteriorated over the past few months: at times the playback was smooth but at other times it was choppy, sometimes to the point of being unlistenable. YouTube is a great place to listen to all kinds of music, its video focus notwithstanding - I've found stuff there that wasn't at Grooveshark and the audio quality is usually as good as it was at Grooveshark on a good day.

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At the end of my "Musical Loose Ends" post I reported that I am no longer within walking distance of a library, but this is actually not true: I could in fact walk to Vista's library if I really wanted to. Although I enjoy/ed listening to music at YouTube and Grooveshark, I miss checking CDs out from the library as I did in New Orleans - if I get back into this I'll let you know.