EMI has sued the free streaming music service Grooveshark today, accusing the site of facilitating copyright infringement.
Says Grooveshark:
For the past year, Grooveshark has been in talks with EMI Records and other copyright holders to negotiate licensing agreements for the use of their content. We are pleased to announce that over the past few months Grooveshark successfully concluded mutually beneficial agreements with many artists, labels, and publishers that we hope to be a template for other such agreements with additional copyright holders.
Recently, EMI Records chose to abandon the template we’ve built with the help of other major copyright holders and opted for their traditional intimidation tactic of filing a lawsuit as a negotiating tool. We find the use of this negotiating strategy counterproductive, as Grooveshark has been willing to conclude an agreement with EMI Records that is economically sustainable for both EMI Records and a start-up company the size of Grooveshark.
Grooveshark is run by a group of young and passionate musicians. We love music, we make music, and we believe that the use of all music should be paid for. We adopted this core philosophy at our inception and to date have concluded agreements with hundreds of record labels, major US performance rights organizations, and thousands of independent artists who support Grooveshark’s business model. (See: Grooveshark Artists)
As musicians, we support the rights of copyright holders and strive to sign sustainable agreements with all content owners, ensuring that all artists get paid– or we agree to remove content from our system in accordance with our DMCA Takedown Policy. We hope that EMI Records eventually follows the lead of the many forward-thinking labels we are already working with, who would rather get their artists exposure and a fair share of our revenue than block content access and force customers to illegal networks.
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Result for: independent artists
WE7.com has launched, and with it comes 500,000 free, ad-supported tracks from Sony BMG and a variety of independent artists.
As the company says, the site is a way for consumers to get the tracks they want “legally, safely and in a format they want”.
We7’s business model allows fans to listen to the music they want, completely free, but each tracks has a “short audio advert onto the front of each track.”
The site also says that the artists and record labels will be paid every time the song is played on the site and that they will be paid from the revenue generated from advertising. We7 hopes the model will curb piracy and provide “a win-win situation for music fans and artists alike.”
Additionally, 30,000 of the tracks can be downloaded and listened to later on portable media devices for free “with the attached advert, which can be removed after a set number of listens, or an amount of elapsed time.”
