Soupy Networking Site with Modified [ Legal ] P2P

For years, P2P file-sharing has been at the wrong enf of many a pointing finger, citing it as one of the primary felons behind priacy and the millions of lost revenue from album sales globally. To make matters worse, it has also allegedly sparked teh whole DRM (Digital Rights Management) debacle, justifiably a drastic action by recording labels to protect their monetized interests. The consumers are at a very limiting end of the field as DRM has proven to be severely restricting. In the midst of it all, Grooveshark surfaces to offer an alternative: legal music downloads where both parties get paid.

GrooveShark is an Arizona-hosted legal P2P music download service that acts like a virtual broker with a social net-working streak and is run by a group of college students under the startup Escape Media Group. Its business model involves charging a maximum amount of 99 cents per song download which would then be split to pay the appropriate royal-ties to music copyright owners and users who have uploaded the downloaded tracks. Another good thing about the ser-vice is that since the downloaded tracks are guaranteed DRM-free, they are play-able on any computer or portable digital music player. There are also plans to include songs registered under the Creative Commons licensing system to be downloaded for free.

The site’s P2P platform enhances its social networking aspect, allowing a more direct and mutual relationship between users to share and compare, not only playlists through its blogs and user profiles, but also actual songs. Other than using the search field, the site modifies user and artist search by providing separate search tabs found on top of the page. You can add users and create your own playlists based on the songs on their playlists or add your profiles to each of the musician’s fan lists.

As of writing, it’s on private beta, but even in its early stages, you can already see its potential of being the future of legal P2P technology. Since it’s on private beta as of the moment, you need to apply for an invitation; and as we’ve tested, it only took one day for our invite to arrive. Once signed in, you are given authoriza-tion to invite five new users into the site. Like Last.fm, you’d have to download, install and run an application called Sharkbyte to be able to utilize all of Grooveshark’s services like streaming music as well as activity and track upload and download monitoring.