EMI have joined the onslaught of record labels demanding royalties from online music website Grooveshark. EMI have filed the lawsuit stating that EMG, Groovesharks parent company has “made not a single royalty payment to EMI, nor provided a single accounting statement.”
The Grooveshark have been in hot water since Universal Music Group lodged a lawsuit in early 2010. EMI are claiming $150,000 in unpaid royalties. EMI also lodged a previous lawsuit in 2009 for copyright violation and the dispute was settled.
For all the content on Grooveshark that is user-generated, the site relies on users to follow guidelines when uploading. Grooveshark’s Terms of Service outlines that no user content shall be “illegal, obscene, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, infringing of intellectual property rights, or otherwise injurious to third parties or objectionable.” which may in turn lead to some users uploading songs that they are not legally allowed to.
Since its opening in 2006, Grooveshark has gained over 35 million users and streams over 100 million tracks a month. In 2010 it was voted in the top 50 websites by time magazine
