On April 30th 2015, Escape Media, parent company to Grooveshark, announced that it was shutting down the music streaming site immediately. Grooveshark, which first launched in 2006, and which had been sued for copyright infringement by the recording industry for many years, entered into a settlement with Universal Music group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group.
Under the terms of the settlement, Grooveshark agreed to wipe its servers clean of all of the record companies' music, surrender ownership of its website, mobile apps, patents and intellectual property. The settlement was reached after a judge ruled that infringement damages could reach as much as $150,000 a song, with as many as 4,907 tracks as part of the lawsuit.
The RIAA, (Recording Industry Assciation of America) stated that, "This is a very important victory for artists and for the entire music industry. This settlement ends a major source of infringing activity." In court papers, the plaintiffs described Grooveshark as, "the linear descendant," of file sharing services such as Napster, Grokster, and Limeware, all of which were shut down due to copyright infringement.
Grooveshark's founders, Josh Greenburg and Sam Tarantino posted a statement on the site's home page that stated that they admit to making mistakes in their efforts to give music fans "the experience that they felt was missing from the web." They apologized both to the record companies for infringing and to their users for letting them down. They also urged their users, whose numbers had reached as many as 35 million, to use other licensed sites such as Spotify, Google Play, Beats, Rhapsody, Dezzer, and Rdio.
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