Grooveshark Rises From the Dead — Sort Of
When there's no more room in hell, the shuttered streaming services will walk the earth.
Just six days after the long-running and industry-shaping free streaming service Grooveshark, facing $736 million in legal damages, shut down for good, a nearly identical site is up and running. It claims to offer 90 percent of the content that the defunct streaming site offered before it closed.
The site is available to users at Grooveshark.io (the original Grooveshark's site was at Grooveshark.com).
The Verge reports that the new site may be a makeover of mp3juices.com, a music piracy site that has already been around for a couple of years.
But the creator of the zombie Grooveshark -- who goes by the name Shark -- claims he scraped Grooveshark's content and moved it to a new site, bringing back the features of the original site at the same time.
"I have huge and unexpected plans for Grooveshark, and I promise you this is not even close to being its end," Shark told The Verge.
Regardless of how the site came about, it works. (I used it this morning to rock out to Bob Seger's "Against the Wind," a quite appropriate Wednesday morning jam.) It's not clear, however, if the service is hosting the music it plays -- the way the original Grooveshark did -- or if it's trawling the internet and playing songs hosted on other servers. If it's doing the latter, they're more protected from claims of copyright infringement, The Verge points out.
Still, there's no doubt the big labels already have Grooveshark.io in their sites. My advice: Aim for the head.