SONG CONTEST BLOG

Grooveshark, the Florida-based streaming music startup that grappled with EMI earlier in the year, has reportedly inked a deal with the major label.

A Webware 100 Winner, Grooveshark allows its users to stream music for free from an aggregate selection of 15 million tracks.  No download or registration required.  The service is supported by online advertising or through a $3/month premium plan which eliminates the ads.

Developed by a group of music enthusiasts from the University of Florida, Grooveshark boasts one million registered users to date.

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Peter Kafka of All Things Digital, part of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network, confirms that one of my favourite music sites and Webware 100 Winner, Grooveshark, is being sued by EMI.  Here is Grooveshark’s statement sourced from Peter’s post:

“For the past year, Grooveshark has been in talks with EMI Records and other copyright holders to negotiate licensing agreements for the use of their content. We are pleased to announce that over the past few months Grooveshark successfully concluded mutually bene?cial agreements with many artists, labels, and publishers that we hope to be a template for other such agreements with additional copyright holders.

Recently, EMI Records chose to abandon the template we’ve built with the help of other major copyright holders and opted for their traditional intimidation tactic of ?ling a lawsuit as a negotiating tool. We ?nd the use of this negotiating strategy counterproductive, as Grooveshark has been willing to conclude an agreement with EMI Records that is economically sustainable for both EMI Records and a start-up company the size of Grooveshark.

Grooveshark is run by a group of young and passionate musicians. We love music, we make music, and we believe that the use of all music should be paid for. We adopted this core philosophy at our inception and to date have concluded agreements with hundreds of record labels, major US performance rights organizations, and thousands of independent artists who support Grooveshark’s business model. (See: Grooveshark Artists)

As musicians, we support the rights of copyright holders and strive to sign sustainable agreements with all content owners, ensuring that all artists get paid– or we agree to remove content from our system in accordance with our DMCA Takedown Policy. We hope that EMI Records eventually follows the lead of the many forward-thinking labels we are already working with, who would rather get their artists exposure and a fair share of our revenue than block content access and force customers to illegal networks.

We understand that the economy of the digital music business is in a state of ?ux, and we hope to help ease this transition by providing the required new tools and services that lead to the next generation of the music industry. We respect the ownership rights of the major labels and publishers, and our core mission has always been to compete with piracy by offering a service that is genuinely better than what illegal networks offer, while also ensuring fair payment to copyright holders. Our next important step on our road to success is to conclude a mutually bene?cial agreement with EMI Records that is sustainable for both EMI and Grooveshark.”

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Adding insult to injury, the founders of The Pirate Bay have been promoting a scheme in protest of the recent ruling against their questionable P2P music service and to spite the law firm representing the plaintiff.  Distributed Denial of Dollars (or DDo$) is a method of attacking the victim with many micro-payments which, in turn, causes disproportional transaction fees and an overload in administration for the recipient.  This gets very interesting… and equally absurd from here.

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A Swedish court has sentenced the four founders of The Pirate Bay for one year and ordered them to pay damages to the tune of $4.5m after the most high profile filesharing crackdown since Shawn Fanning’s Napster came to ruling.  In spite of the hefty punishment, The Pirate Bay website, a BitTorrent search platform (BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer program used for uploading and downloading files), contains video footage of the founders’ amusement by the verdict, which they intend to appeal.

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EMI began sending out invitations for EMI.com subscribers last Friday to try an extension of the label’s website at YourSoundCheck.com.  The platform, which I have not yet been able to preview for some reason, acts as a crowd sourced research initiative for EMI to learn about its consumers’ musical opinions and desires.  More on this if and when I gain access.

On demand music streaming service, Spotify, has been on my radar since the company announced a distribution deal with CD Baby in the first week of February.  CD Baby, the leading force in independent music retail and digital music distribution, represents more than 175,000 artists which account for over one million tracks, all of which are now available through Spotify’s lightweight music streaming application.  This licensing deal marks the ‘long-tail’ trend in music availability and consumption, and celebrates the access independent artists have today to mass audiences through pioneering music services, many of which had treated indie talent as nothing more than an afterthought after securing major label catalogues.  Under the aphorism of “access not ownership”, the Luxemburg-based company has been growing exponentially since its €15.3m venture capital injection in October 2008 and, in turn, joining an elite group of legal music experience providers such as Pandora, Last.fm, TheSixtyOne, and others, which have found success in catering to music consumers through a balanced and worldly music library whilst reserving significant real-estate for up and coming artists: a pop-culture and grassroots music mix that appears to be paving the way for a new industry.  A spot in Spotify’s limelight is not yet available directly for small acts and labels but CD Baby has certainly lowered the barrier of entry.  Thank you Derek or, rather, Disc Makers for making this possible…

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Music search engine, SeeqPod, that has already indexed (but not stored) 12 million songs, has been handed a formal complaint from EMI following a lawsuit from Warner last year.  Unlike Pandora and Imeem, the company has not pursued licenses to provide “playable search results” maintaining that they are not responsible for content sources and, therefore, free from any obligation to the copyright holder.  Legally questionable, Seeqpod has become very successful and the two major labels are probably going after it to settle on a mutual business model rather than to shut it down.  The news prompted me to play with the system a little and I enjoyed learning about their artist-centric advertising progamme that’s highly targeted and cost competitive.  Providing 5000 “exposures” (i.e. impressions) a month for $19.95, SeeqPod Echo is a nicely put together search-oriented advertising interface which may very well generate some relevant traffic for artists and music promoters who wish to tap into SeeqPod’s massive music listening community.  I’m curious to learn how the conversion rates stack up.