Open Air

Is Grooveshark the answer?

August 4th, 2008 Posted by: l.dewis

With six ISP’s signed up to a UK Government drive to stamp out illegal music downloads everyone is looking for the next big thing in legitimate file-sharing. I met the Grooveshark team earlier in the year when they were in beta. They had a plan to entice users by giving them a share of profits. If you upload music to Grooveshark and someone buys the track, you get a cut (probably tiny but gift horse, mouth). P2P advertising that keeps the publishers happy.

CNET have said:

In the turbulent, choppy waters where P2P networks and copyright law chomp at each other’s fins for dominance, there’s at least one beast that thinks it has a solution to keep everybody happy. Its name: Grooveshark.

Free streaming. Social networking. Music discovery. Oh, and reimbursement for sharing when somebody buys a song that you’ve uploaded to the collective.

And Wired magazine wrote:

If you’re looking for a way to grab music from peer-to-peer networks without that nagging feeling that you’re depriving a starving artist of her next meal (or a label exec of that Learjet upgrade), Grooveshark might help.

Publishers who own the third party material on OpenLearn have suggested we do a similar thing. If they could find out more about who is interested in their materials and see some resulting sales, they might make more of their materials freely available on OpenLearn.

Entry Filed under: Business models, Innovation, Media law