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All new Grooveshark taken down, twice and counting
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 18 May 2015
The all new Grooveshark has been taken down already. Twice. Possibly three times by the time you read this.
As previously reported, the original Grooveshark, a thorn in the side of the music industry for many years, finally went offline at the end of last month, as long-running legal battles between the record companies and the streaming start-up began to fall in the former’s favour. Founders of the digital firm became panicked about the size of damages they could be ordered to pay by the courts, so they reached a deal with the labels, shut their company down and apologised big time.
But almost immediately a clone of the service went live at another domain – grooveshark.io – seemingly the result of an anonymous figure called Shark, supposedly a former affiliate of the always controversial streaming platform, having backed up the majority of the now defunct site before it went down.
Though, as Torrentfreak pointed out, while Grooveshark v2 might have used the original service’s branding, and may have boasted a bulk of the dead streaming site’s catalogue, it wasn’t actually a straight copy of the recently deceased streaming platform. Rather, it was more of an MP3 search service akin to (and possibly copied from) MP3juices.se.
But either way, the music industry’s legal people seemingly got to business with immediate effect, because last week the new Grooveshark site was taken down too, it’s domain name seized in what the aforementioned Shark called a “brutal takeover” (his earlier ripping of an existing website and all its illegal content having been decidedly unbrutal, presumably).
Speaking to Music Week, Shark blamed the speedy takedown on “those who have the ‘dough’ [to] control the world”. But he insisted he wasn’t beaten, and sure enough the site soon reappeared at grooveshark.vc. That site too was quickly taken down, though currently there is something going on at grooveshark.li – as a simple Google search will tell you (thus again illustrating the problem with speedy domain takedowns, new sites always reappear and Google helps fans find them).
Concluding, Master Shark told Music Week: “I have one message for those responsible for this hostile take over: ‘You will not stop us’. On the contrary. The harder you come at us the stronger we’ll fight, and now after this hit we’re more determined than ever to keep Grooveshark alive and kicking”.
So, that’ll be fun.