If you’re among the long-term Grooveshark users still mourning that controversial streaming service’s demise—along with the elaborate playlists you’d stored with it—you’ll be happy to hear about StreamSquid. This new streaming-music service is just as free as Grooveshark, which was recently sued out of existence. The difference is that StreamSquid’s creators maintain its service is perfectly legal because all the music comes from legitimate third-party sources such as SoundCloud and YouTube
Let’s take a brief look back at Grooveshark before we delve into the details of how StreamSquid works. Launched in 2006, Grooveshark had a vast, supposedly crowdsourced catalogue of music files that almost anyone could access for free (in exchange for viewing ads). Grooveshark also offered a paid service that was free from ads, but it was the gratis offering that made it the streaming destination of choice for millions around the world.
Where the service ran afoul of the law as in its failure to secure the proper licenses from the major record labels for the music it was offering up. That situation finally came to a head last April, when Grooveshark was forced permanently close up shop.
A number of clones of the same name (albeit with different top-level domains) have surfaced since then, only to be quickly taken down. StreamSquid is different. It is not a clone, but just a spiritual successor of sorts. The only real link between the two is StreamSquid’s ability to let people revive their Grooveshark playlists using nothing but their username/email.
All you need is your Grooveshark login ID to retrieve your old playlists and stream via SoundSquid.
The site’s developers told Torrentfreak.com that they were devastated when the infamous service went down, believing the playlists that they had so laboriously put together over the years were gone too. But as they were to soon discover, not all was lost since a backup server was still online. StreamSquid’s developers happily went to town and secured all the playlist data that they could find for their own service.
That backup server, however, is not the source of the music on the new site. In fact, StreamSquid doesn’t host any music, relying instead on third-party sources. In other words, it’s essentially a music search engine that also lets you create and browse playlists. It apparently has a tie-up with Last.fm for some of its playlist-related functionality.
“StreamSquid is legal,” Ofir Yosef, one of the site’s founders, assured Torrentfreak. “We use YouTube and SoundCloud APIs to stream music legally and meet all requirements and terms of services. Everything is double checked.”
Why this matters: While it is for SoundCloud and YouTube to decide whether StreamSquid complies with the terms of use of their respective APIs, the record labels might eventually have something to say about this. Profit-making corporations don’t think much of the concept that music can be free. But for now, StreamSquid looks like a viable workaround for those orphaned by Grooveshark’s demise.