Grooveshark was a web-based music streaming service owned and operated by Escape Media Group in the United States.

Grooveshark was a service of Escape Media Group Inc. (EMG), based in Gainesville, Florida,[12] with additional offices located in New York City.

[13] It was founded in March 2006 by three undergraduates at the University of Florida:[14] Andrés Barreto, Josh Greenberg and Sam Tarantino[15][16] (who became CEO).

During its first two years, Grooveshark functioned as a paid downloadable music service,[17] with its content sourced from its proprietary peer-to-peer (P2P) network, which required users to install its "Sharkbyte" application.

[14] The new web service was a Flash media player called "Grooveshark Lite",[21] and added a feature for autoplaying recommended songs.

[22] The service rose in popularity, with founders Greenberg and Tarantino named 2008 finalists for Bloomberg Businessweek's list of "America's Best Young Entrepreneurs".

[26] On October 27, 2009, Grooveshark revised its interface, which featured skipping to any point in a song,[27] left-hand navigation, customizable site themes, and drag-and-drop editing of playlists.

[33] On September 5, 2012, Grooveshark presented its full HTML5 player, effectively nullifying Google's and Apple's decisions to make the service unavailable to mobile apps.

The Grooveshark website was replaced with a message announcing the closure, and pointed users towards licensed music streaming services.

[38][39] Shortly after the shutdown, a new Grooveshark-branded website surfaced under a different top-level domain, offering a basic MP3 search engine that claimed to use the site's previous library of music, and promising to restore much of its original functionality.

[53] Grooveshark offered two subscription services that gave users increased features, no banner ads, and playability on mobile devices.

[54][55] In 2013, Entertainment Weekly compared a number of music services and granted Grooveshark a "B", rating, "Users upload libraries onto cloud servers, which means fewer catalog holes.

[66] In July 2012, New York State Supreme Court Judge Barbara Kapnick ruled that pre-1972 recordings were covered by the "safe harbor" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act[67][68] In April 2013, the New York State Supreme Court of Appeals reversed the decision, saying that pre-1972 licenses are not covered by the DMCA.

[70] UMG cited internal documents revealing that Grooveshark employees uploaded thousands of illegal copies of UMG-owned recordings.

[70][71] Grooveshark denied all the complaints, complaining there was a "gross mischaracterisation" of the documents obtained during the lawsuit's discovery phase.

[72] Another major label, EMI, had also signed a license agreement for streaming music with Grooveshark in 2009 after settling a previous copyright lawsuit.