So it's been about three weeks since Grooveshark finally went down for good, and I'm still annoyed about it in this low-grade, background way, like a tooth that only hurts when you chew on that side.
For anyone who somehow missed it: Grooveshark shut down on April 30th after years of getting sued by basically every major label (Universal, Sony, Warner, all of them) over the fact that its whole model was letting users upload and stream MP3s that nobody had licensed. The settlement finally caught up with them and the company just... folded. The site now redirects to a page with a groveling apology letter on it. I read the whole thing the day it happened and it's genuinely uncomfortable, like watching someone read a hostage statement.
I want to be clear that I know why this happened and I'm not going to pretend Grooveshark was some scrappy underdog getting bullied by evil record labels. It was built on unlicensed uploads. That was the whole point. But I'd been using it since maybe 2010, and my library on there was this weird, extremely specific archive that doesn't really exist anywhere else — bootleg live sets, a couple of albums that got pulled from Spotify over licensing spats, an entire folder of stuff a friend uploaded from his college radio show. None of that is coming back. I didn't even think to back up playlist names, let alone the actual files, because who thinks a website is going to just cease to exist on a Thursday.
The bigger annoyance is what it exposes about how fragile all of this is. We spent the last five or six years getting everyone to move off owning MP3s and onto streaming, myself included, and the pitch was always "it's fine, it's all in the cloud now, you don't need to manage files." Which is true right up until the company running the cloud gets a judgment against it and disappears overnight. I moved most of my daily listening to Spotify a while back ($9.99 a month, which still feels like a lot for something that used to be free, but here we are) and Rdio's still around too if you want a second opinion, but neither one has half the weird stuff Grooveshark had. Try finding a specific 2009 tour rip of a band nobody's heard of on Spotify. You won't.
What's been funny, in a slightly depressing way, is watching a handful of clone sites pop up in the days right after the shutdown, all with some variation of "Grooveshark" in the name, clearly scraped or rebuilt from whatever index they could grab before the lights went out. I tried two of them. One was covered in ad popups to the point where it felt actively hostile to use. The other worked fine for about four days and then vanished too. I assume it's the same story on repeat — no licensing, no money, no lawyers to survive the inevitable letter.
None of this is a grand statement about the death of music ownership or whatever, I just miss having a version of my library that felt like mine instead of a subscription I'm renting month to month. I've started actually keeping local copies of the handful of albums I care most about again, which feels a little bit like going backwards, dragging files into a folder on my laptop like it's 2006. Maybe that's the actual lesson here and I was just too lazy to learn it the easy way.
Also, unrelated tangent, but Age of Ultron is still doing absurd business at the box office almost three weeks out from release, and I finally saw it last weekend at the second-to-last showing of the night because that's apparently the only time I have free anymore. It was fine. Long. I don't have strong feelings about it, which after all the hype feels like its own kind of verdict.
Anyway. Back up your stuff, or at least the stuff you'd actually be upset to lose. Learned that one the hard way this month.