A rather stripped down, somewhat unstable version of the original Grooveshark is available, grooveshark.im, and it seems to draw at least some of its content from SoundCloud, as well as Grooveshark's backed up archives. How do I figure? A search revealed my original Grooveshark catalog plus some songs I only remember adding to SoundCloud due to copyright issues on NG or straight forgetfulness. Unless someone specifically downloaded these songs from my SoundCloud and uploaded them to Grooveshark, I highly doubt "Track 2" or "Renegade Dances", both of which are classical music, would be on Grooveshark at all, since I never uploaded them. It's worth checking into, for sure, if not only for curiosity's sake. Playlists are fully functional from what I can tell, and the search is blazing fast.

Now, onto the story behind this. Grooveshark's latest iteration is the third or fourth since its untimely demise in May. Its reviver, identified as Shark, responded to the entities responsible for the recent, "brutal" top-level domain takedowns of subsequent iterations by saying, "You can not stop us. On the contrary! The harder you come at us the stronger we'll fight."

He and his team aim to release Grooveshark in open-source, a victory for all but the record labels who are already filthy rich from exploiting artists' talent, paying the average musician a measly $23.40 for every $1000 dollars of music sales (source), and you can bet the big four are bothered by the possibility of a free streaming service that cuts them out of the loop, doesn't send you thousands of ads begging for you to go premium, doesn't charge the artist for uploading their catalog, allows you to play anything you want at any time, and doesn't pester you to download copies of songs you can't access outside of the service only to wipe gigabytes of music from your bank if you then sync these songs to more than 3 devices (I'm looking at you, Spotify).

You know what I think? Everyone should be thanking them -- free adverising that denies labels an excuse to extract payment from artists by charging for hosting, packaging, etc. Artists may not make money directly from Grooveshark, but you know as well as I do, getting your music out there in the first place is the surest way to generate sales. This is why labels exist, to propagate the music, only they take hefty cuts of sales for themselves. Artists these days mostly make money from live performances, tickets, and merchandise sold at these events.

This is why the labels are coming down hard on any service that cuts them out of the loop and why I think Grooveshark deserves to live. It will force labels to be more competitive and fair to both the consumer and the artist. What about you? Drop a comment and share if you're excited to see where we're headed from here.