UPDATE (05/05/15): For the time being, there appears to be a 90% clone up at https://grooveshark.io/. According to BGR: “On Tuesday, I received an email from someone calling himself Shark — an individual connected to Grooveshark who has assembled a team to bring the site back to life. “How can I do this?,” he asks in the email. “Well, I started backing up all the content on the website when I started suspecting that Grooveshark’s demise is close and my suspicion was confirmed a few days later when they closed. By the time they closed I have already backed up 90% of the content on the site and I’m now working on getting the remaining 10%.”“

Grooveshark was shut down yesterday by one of America’s most cancerous internal organs: copyright trolls / the RIAA.

https://www.theverge.com/2015/ 4/30/8526105/grooveshark- shuts-down-settles-with-labels

https://grooveshark.com/

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If you’re like me and you had thousands of hours of playlists put together from the last few years and depended heavily on them for your personal music curation, that sucks. Grooveshark had great discovery algorithms and a thriving community, and was a viable way to stay up on new music. Let alone that it was 1) the only good free music streaming service, 2) appreciated and supported by many small and independent artists, 3) hosting huge amounts of rare and out-of-print music.

Retrieve your playlists.

Fortunately, if you are lucky, you may be able to at least retrieve your playlists. They might be available at:

https://groovebackup.com/

You can find more info (other possible methods of retrieval) in this helpful reddit thread:

httpss://www.reddit.com/r/ Music/comments/34goss/meta_ grooveshark_shut_down_forever_ today/

Explore alternatives.

I am exploring a few GS replacements now that it is gone. In doing so, I want to ensure that I am, first and foremost, promoting the free exchange of information. For that reason, I am still a big proponent of Torrenting.

httpss://torrentfreak.com/top-popular-torrent-sites-2015-150104/

Just make sure you are using a good VPN when you use them, and you are in the clear, legally speaking. Am I encouraging you to break the law? “If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so.” Here’s a list of good VPNs:

httpss://www.privacytools.io/#vpn

I also want to make sure I am not supporting the “record industry” or the litigation mafia funneling money to the top of the corporate hierarchy, away from the artists creating the value. For that reason, I don’t advocate licensing-bound services like Spotify or Rdio. They also employ dark patterns, obnoxious advertising, and disingenuous onboarding techniques, and these are reasons enough to boycott them.

I was recently turned on to this site, which seems like a pretty cool alternative, but I haven’t used it enough to know if it really has as large of a library as Grooveshark did.

https://mp3cosmos.com/

There is another cool option I can vouch for though. Streamus.  Streamus is a Chrome plugin with playlist/radio functionality, which sources its tracks from YouTube. It’s completely open source!

httpss://streamus.com/getting- started

Music on YouTube comes in all forms, from licensed to unlicensed, high to low quality, official to user-generated. I’m not sure how Streamus chooses tracks, but so far they have been accurate and hi-fi.

The guy who makes it is a redditor and was right there when GS went down, so he wrote some scripts which will help you import your Grooveshark playlists (retrieved form groovebackup.com) into Streamus. I did it and it worked great, with almost 100% carryover. So now I have my thousands of hours back. Here are instructions for importing, from his post on reddit:

Screencast HERE: https://screencast.com/t/ PV0Ui2wd82
Scripts 1 and 2 HERE: httpss://gist.github.com/ MeoMix/b8e5e4a38802aff2c11e
TL;DR:

  1. Go to https://groovebackup.com/
  2. Login
  3. Open developer tools, console, copy/paste first script, press enter.
  4. Copy array of data when it says its done and replace null at the top of second script with array of data.
  5. Go to chrome://extensions/
  6. Click ‘developer mode’
  7. Open Streamus’ background.html
  8. copy/paste the second script which you have modified with your data from script 1
  9. Press enter, run it. Give it a while — it’s artificially slowed down to not wreck my server and time you out.
  10. Presto, data.

Cheers. I hope this eases your transition into something new. I’m sure the Streisand Effect is already in motion and that some agile network of developers will release something even better and more resilient than GS soon enough. So take that and stuff it, evil empire.

UPDATE (05/05/15): Looks like I was right. For the time being, there appears to be a 90% clone up at https://grooveshark.io/. 

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