21 votes

Grooveshark: The original Spotify

2 comments

  1. Mendanbar
    Link
    That was super interesting. I was a user of Grooveshark back in the day and recall vividly that final shutdown message. It all felt very sudden at the time. I had no idea about the founder's...

    That was super interesting. I was a user of Grooveshark back in the day and recall vividly that final shutdown message. It all felt very sudden at the time. I had no idea about the founder's death, though. So strange and sad.

    7 votes
  2. vili
    Link
    Somewhere between the death of Napster and the birth of Grooveshark, there was also a service called Weedshare. Anyone here remember it? My memories are a bit hazy, but it functioned sort of like...

    Somewhere between the death of Napster and the birth of Grooveshark, there was also a service called Weedshare. Anyone here remember it?

    My memories are a bit hazy, but it functioned sort of like Grooveshark's sales model where individual users could make money from sales of copyrighted work, except in Weedshare's case you not only received a commission from your sale to your friend, but also when your friend sold the track to their friend, and that person sold it to another, and so on. Archive.org has the platform's original explanation archived, if you are interested. The idea was to create a network that would allow fans to trade music with each other while also benefitting the artists.

    If I recall correctly, one of my favourite artist at the time, Terence Trent D'Arby, who had just changed his name to Sananda Maitreya and fought his record company, released his first fully independent album largely on Weedshare. While Weedshare was a pipe dream, and definitely already felt like one when it was announced, I was a little disappointed that it didn't become popular. Despite being a little pyramid-schemey, its affiliation system could have been an interesting model for a lot of digital sales.

    3 votes