Grooveshark gets sued by EMI

Grooveshark, a service which offers free music streaming over the web has gained popularity over the years.

Rossi Fernandes|Jan 07, 2012, 13:22:29 IST

Grooveshark, a service which offers free music streaming over the web has gained popularity over the years. Here, users are also given the option to buy paid accounts that offer more. Now, Mediabeat is reporting that Grooveshark is being sued by record label, EMI. Grooveshark’s company Escape has not made any payments to EMI, they claim. There are other services such as Spotify that have licensed music, Grooveshark has a mix of unlicensed music as well. It works by illegal music being made available by users. If a recording artist or music label has an issue, it complains to Grooveshark and that unlicensed music is disabled. Grooveshark has been in constant trouble after pretty much every major such as Universal, Sony Music and Warner Music have filed lawsuits against them.

Not everyone's happy with Grooveshark

EMI has hundreds of artists under its label. Grooveshark claims they have $150,000 fees pending, but EMI has said that the number is much larger than that. Grooveshark has some 30 million users and a total of some 15 billion songs that are accessed through a year. Grooveshark made a deal with EMI Music, back in 2009.

By Rossi Fernandes

Our resident Hardware Ninja, Rossi, lives for speed - by uhh riding his bicycle. He's Tech2's utility man, dividing his time between cameras, software and intense bouts of Quake III. He's also a fan of all things obscure, case in point, Live for Speed (sic). Never heard of it? We rest our case. In his spare time he tries to teach our new joinees the tricks of the trade even though the blood sweat and tears, but give him a camera and all things forgotten.