Is Grooveshark the Spotify alpha they are talking about in this article?
I recall being pretty confused by Grooveshark. It seemed… like, I mean, it was possible to stream a ton of music for free, so it had a vaguely pirate-y feel to it. But then, at the time YouTube also hosted a ton of music and other content seemingly without any license.
It was a weird time. IIRC lots of people seemed to think streaming was somehow distinct from downloading a file.
I used Songbird from roughly when it came out and one of the features that I like was using mp3 blogs as playlists, then downloading the files I liked. I'm sure most of them are gone now unless I happen to still have a harddrive around from that time. But I found so much music that way. I'm not sure how I found the blogs now? Maybe that was when they would list the blogs they linked to on the side, or the blogs the author liked. I remember coming across communities of Andalusian punk, Finnish metal, Norwegian electronic music, and digitized Soviet rock/punk. Now I look back and wonder if those mp3s were there to download because streaming wasn't quite accessible enough. That was probably just a 2-4 year period I'm thinking of, maybe 2005~2009?
I think I met the founders at TechCrunch Disrupt in about 2008 and their reaction to "what about licensing?" (the most obvious question for a streaming service) was essentially "lol."
I understand the need to protect intellectual property, and much as I hate how it is run in the US, copyright it vital, but it’s sad that platforms like Grooveshark are casualties of our system.
In around 2009, I remember my dad used to listen to music on his laptop a lot, but getting songs synchronized between different computers was a pain in the ass before the days of Plex or Jellyfin and the like. When I introduced him to Grooveshark, it was sort of huge for him; he started making tons of playlists, and it was easy to listen to stuff everywhere. IIRC he figured out how to install Flash on his early Android phone so he could stream Grooveshark from his car.
