I'm not going to lie, we're competitors, and I have plenty of people tell me they're happy with Grooveshark, and that you provide a lot of value. I also hear the other side, and I hope that Grooveshark gets what it deserves from Universal.
The fact still remains that Grooveshark as it is wouldn't exist if not for the many years it's had to benefit from free use of mainstream content. That's not what DMCA was created for. It was created to protect people who mostly have UGC and occasionally have their terms violated. If Grooveshark was one of those companies, they would look more like Unsigned.com right now.
The music industry's legal system is complex. We all know that. Other companies are navigating that complexity in much more difficult ways, being much more honest to the spirit of the law. Grooveshark takes advantage of the laws and operates a service that has only one foot in legality. Of course it would be easy to build a business that way and then get the praises of those companies you forge relationships with _after_ your audience and platform is already valuable. But there is more to be said for a company that takes the hard road and does the same. I think Pandora has had a miserable time of it, but at least they did it right.
Whichever way you look at it, building a business in the music space is difficult. We're all probably competing with piracy more so than each other. There is no good road. You make it sound like we've had it easy, which is not the case. Every employee has at some time gone without pay for an extended period of time. Mine was 10 months. That's the sort of dedication it takes to bring a product from a thousand users to millions when you're underfunded. And our relationships didn't form suddenly when we had millions of users. They were the result of years of work in the trenches when our userbase was small- going to concerts, promoting artists, branding our site...basically everything we could do to get their songs heard.
I think you're straying a little from the topic. Yes, company building is hard. No, that does not make it okay that Grooveshark built it's business by streaming a lot of mainstream music that it didn't, and in many cases still doesn't, have licenses for.
I didn't say you've had it easy. I said you built your company on the backs of artists' content without paying them. So, each employee went a few months without pay. Most of the artists playing on Grooveshark went (and are still going) much longer.
The fact still remains that Grooveshark as it is wouldn't exist if not for the many years it's had to benefit from free use of mainstream content. That's not what DMCA was created for. It was created to protect people who mostly have UGC and occasionally have their terms violated. If Grooveshark was one of those companies, they would look more like Unsigned.com right now.
The music industry's legal system is complex. We all know that. Other companies are navigating that complexity in much more difficult ways, being much more honest to the spirit of the law. Grooveshark takes advantage of the laws and operates a service that has only one foot in legality. Of course it would be easy to build a business that way and then get the praises of those companies you forge relationships with _after_ your audience and platform is already valuable. But there is more to be said for a company that takes the hard road and does the same. I think Pandora has had a miserable time of it, but at least they did it right.