The legal saga centered around the Grooveshark name appears to be getting a bizarre epilogue. Last week, Grooveshark finally resigned itself to its fate and shuttered its doors. However, the long-beleagured site and its legally uncertain approach to streaming music appears to have returned to the web.
The clone is the work of a dedicated individual dubbed Shark, who claims to have backed up 90% of Grooveshark’s content and put it back up online. However, The Verge noted that the new Grooveshark.io domain appears to be a rebranded version of mp3juices.se, which is a music piracy site. The Verge examined the claims made about the new site and, somewhat unsurprisingly, found its statement that the content is hosted on third-party servers to be completely false. Acting as a musical search engine that pulls content from third-party servers might have been a valid option for the site, but this reported misrepresentation of its service and legal standing indicate just how underhanded this new clone is.
“I have huge and unexpected plans for Grooveshark, and I promise you this is not even close to being its end,” Shark said. We’ll see how long it can stay afloat.