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 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.