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Digital Grooveshark Timeline
Grooveshark disappears from Facebook
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 8 May 2012
Various online commentators noted this weekend that Grooveshark’s presence on and link with Facebook has now been down for a week, leading to speculation the social network has cut the rogue streaming music service loose, possibly under pressure for the major record companies who are currently suing the Groovey digital firm.
It seems that Grooveshark’s official page and app have been deleted from the Facebook platform, and that users therefore can no longer automatically share listening data from the streaming site with the social network. Meanwhile, over on the Grooveshark site itself, you can no longer login using your Facebook identity. Users can manually link to tracks on Grooveshark via their Facebook timelines, but the automated hook ups that have poven so valuable to other streaming music services in terms of generating new traffic seem to have been shut off.
When Grooveshark first disappeared from Facebook at the end of April, the digital music service posted a message on its blog insisting an error had occurred. The blog post read: “Grooveshark’s Facebook app integration and our Facebook page were disabled by Facebook [last] Saturday afternoon. We believe they were disabled in error and we are in communication with Facebook to try to understand exactly what’s going on, so we hope to see a resolution to these problems soon”.
However, a week on, and with the issue not resolved, the ‘error’ explanation seems less likely (assuming, that is, that Grooveshark has a direct link with the social network – if the company is talking to Facebook’s online customer support, it could be 2020 before it hears anything back).
Grooveshark, of course, faces litigation from a plethora of rights owners, even though the US-based streaming platform does have deals in place with some artists and labels, and insists that its ‘users upload the music’ approach is legal under US copyright law, even if it results in a lot of unlicensed tracks appearing in its catalogues at anyone time.
Founder Sam Tarantino recently gave an interview to Evolver.fm in which he defending his company’s approach, insisting artists benefited from his platform even if over-demanding major record companies couldn’t see that. Though it’s unlikely Tarantino’s arguments will win over any of those labels or artists who increasingly see Grooveshark as the enemy. See what you think here.
