This past Friday (October 14), we shared an email thread between Robert Fripp, his team, and Grooveshark that Digital Music News were cc’d on. The emails chronicled Fripp’s struggle to get King Crimson’s material and his solo work removed from the streaming service. As it turns out, though, Fripp isn’t the only one who has been having communication problems with Grooveshark. Relapse Records’ Director Of Sales Pat Egan was kind enough to share the metal label’s similar experience with Grooveshark exclusively to Metal Insider. Here’s what he had to say:
I saw the tweet about the Grooveshark/ King Crimson issue and I couldn’t help but chuckle. Ok, when I read Grooveshark’s replies, I rolled on the ground laughing as it was the same double talk that went on for months (maybe a year) between Relapse and Grooveshark.
About a year ago we realized that most if not all of our catalog (500 + titles) were available on Grooveshark without our permission and we immediately contacted Grooveshark, and we heard back fairly quickly from Aaron Ford with some of the best double talk I’ve ever seen. He went on about how they weren’t doing anything wrong and if we submitted the offending links they would take them down. We had an employee and multiple interns spend hundreds of hours to provide the links to Grooveshark. A few weeks later all those links were finally taken down, but new ones had popped up and we were told that we needed to submit all the new links. When we complained, the reply was “we can’t control what people upload.” Logically we said “Why don’t you stop allowing people to upload files?” They never replied to that issue. At this point they suggested we sign on with them. (Reward them for making this far more difficult?) We declined.
I haven’t followed up on our dealings with Grooveshark recently as it was just mentally draining. I sympathize with Robert Fripp and his team. It’s about time someone stops these guys.
