Grooveshark’s ride to popularity has abruptly ended, at least in Germany. German users trying to access the website of the popular music streaming service Grooveshark are now greeted with an informational page telling them that the service has ended its operation in the country. According to the information, cost of operation reached a level in Germany that did not allow the company to continue offering their streaming music service.
You probably think that bandwidth and storage costs have fueled that decision, but that’s far away from the truth. It seems that the German performance rights organization GEMA, the bane of all music on the Internet, has once again had its hand in play. The organization is for instance the reason that German users are not able to watch many music videos that are posted on YouTube.
GEMA in 2009 asked Google to pay $0,013 per song played on YouTube. Google declined back then and as a result, German users cannot watch the majority of music videos on YouTube.
Grooveshark likely faced a similar decision, and like Google, Grooveshark decided to pull out of the country instead.
A GEMA mail address is listed on the page for users to direct their complaints to. It may be more fruitful on the other hand to direct complaints directly to politicans and not the GEMA.
Grooveshark recommends the German Simfy service as an alternative. And while that service looks like a great alternative on first glance, it needs to be noted that free users (with an account) only get five hours of free music per month. Users who would like to listen to more music need to switch to the Premium account which sets them back €4.99 each month.
Existing Grooveshark users can export their music from the service. A link is provided in the announcement.
The mobile clients are currently still working. It will however only be a matter of time until they will be shut down as well. (via Caschy)
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