Well… guess who's back? After its official farewell and the exploration of some direct alternatives, a member of the old Grooveshark team seems to have decided to flip the bird to the record labels and put the service online under a new domain. This revival — about 90 percent complete — is now live at Grooveshark.io, and its person in charge is working to bring back the remaining features.
Back from the dead
What do services that distribute (or help distribute) media have in common with comic book characters? None of them stay dead. It's hard to count how many times The Pirate Bay has been taken down. Megaupload was sliced and diced by US justice, but the new MEGA is still there. KickAssTorrents has become an expert at rotating domains, and now it's Grooveshark's turn. If you visit the official site you'll see the goodbye, the apology, and the resignation. However, it only took five days to rise from the ashes. In true Sherlock style, the new Grooveshark has told the world 'Not Dead', and anyone interested can go right now to listen and download music.
The person behind the comeback
Only known as 'Shark', he says he started backing up Grooveshark when the first signs of its closure appeared. Once the last message from the old Grooveshark appeared on the official site, Shark already had 90 percent of the information, and is now working to get the remaining 10 percent. There's no word on mobile app support, and it would be too hasty to think about that. The web version lets us listen and download, but you can't even create a user account.
One big question is how the new Grooveshark will escape legal fury. The portal relies on DMCA resources and offers a way to request removal of specific songs. In other words, Grooveshark declares itself a search engine, and can't be held responsible for the kind of content users put on the web. The domain belongs to the British Indian Ocean Territory, which actually has a generic profile, and the site's registration is in Ukraine, so I think it will dodge the nuclear missiles... at least for a while.
