Grooveshark is officially dead, but a rogue fan backed up 90% of the music and relaunched a new version of the streaming website
Grooveshark, originally founded in 2006, quickly became popular among music fans because of its on-demand catalogue that allowed you to stream songs a la carte long before Spotify arrived on the scene. While popular, many of the songs uploaded to Grooveshark were copyrighted songs - with even Grooveshark's founders reportedly instructing employees to upload popular songs - all of which eventually led to the official website's shutdown.
Less than a week later after Grooveshark went dark, a new version of Grooveshark has popped up, and it's the handiwork of a rogue fan who goes by "Shark," who claims he managed to back up 90% of the songs before the official website's shutdown, according to BGR.
"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," Shark wrote to BGR in an email. "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%."
To protect itself from being yanked down again, the new Grooveshark website includes a legal disclaimer, informing users that "the songs you want to download may have copyright(s) on them" and that "you're not allowed to download the song if you don't possess the original record."
Of course, even with obvious links to file DMCA take-down requests and its legal disclaimers plastered all over the site, there's no telling how long the new Grooveshark will manage to keep the lights on - so don't cancel that Spotify Premium membership quite yet.