Days after its demise, ‘Grooveshark’ is now back but not officially. It is reported that a certain group of people has established a replica which is now being hosted at Grooveshark.io (the original one was .com) anyway as long as it allow users to stream, download and search the particular music files it’s okay but that’s not all, it also contain many copyrighted material files that got the original site in trouble.
Replica’s creator, who goes under the pseudonym ‘Shark’, claims to have started backing up ‘Grooveshark’ after suspecting that it was about to go offline. Shark claims to have backed up 90 percent of Grooveshark’s content and to have also assembled a team dedicated to bringing all of Grooveshark’s features, including playlists and favorites, back online.
Shark says, “I was connected to ‘Grooveshark’ a few years back and I have, together with the team I’ve gathered, the knowledge and the technological abilities to bring it back to life.”
The website doesn’t appear to allow visitors to upload their music, unlike the original site. Instead, it claims to be a music search engine that crawls the web for music hosted elsewhere, which could distance it from legal troubles. Of course, that’s only true if the claim is true. Grooveshark.io says that all of its content is hosted on third-party servers and that it’ll even display where the music was indexed from. In my brief testing, however, that turned out to be false. It took a matter of seconds to find a copyrighted song hosted under the site’s domain. Maybe Grooveshark.io doesn’t own the actual servers, but that’s not exactly what “third party” means.