A new music streaming service called StreamSquid has managed to revive Grooveshark playlists from the dead. The service streams former Grooveshark playlist content via YouTube, Soundcloud and other legal sources.
Earlier this year, the ongoing lawsuit against Grooveshark initiated by the RIAA was settled, as Grooveshark agreed to shut down and pay $50 million to record labels. Grooveshark users who had spent years developing playlists using content available on the streaming service were heartbroken, seemingly having to start rebuilding their music streaming collection at square one with another streaming service.
Three of those users, Ofir Yosef, Itzik Ben-Bassat and Ziv Waksman, also happened to be Web developers, and they began brainstorming a solution that could help not only themselves but the thousands of former Grooveshark users in the same position. According to Yosef, "It was devastating at first as we thought that we'd lost our personal music hub. The huge effort that took many years to build and collect songs and playlists was gone in a single court decision."
The group quickly discovered that all was not lost: a backup file of all former Grooveshark playlists was recovered, and the three savvy music lovers began the process of matching the tracks to music currently being streamed legally on various available sources, such as YouTube and Soundcloud. The result, born only weeks later, is StreamSquid.
"StreamSquid is a free music streaming service that lets you discover, create and share the music you love. It's the easy way to play the music you want online, legally and free," boasts Yosef. "And now it also lets you import your lost Grooveshark music and start listening to it almost immediately."
StreamSquid partnered with Last.fm to help develop an intuitive user interface. In addition, former Grooveshark users are able to revive their playlists via a single click. The service is free, and, according to its creators, perfectly legal, as it hosts no content on its servers and uses only legal sources to stream content. Time will tell whether the Music And Film Industry Association of America (MAFIAA) agrees or finds some sort of legal basis on which to claim copyright violations. Until then, at least, it appears that Grooveshark has gotten its groove back via StreamSquid.
