If you’re looking to add some DRM-free songs or albums to your music library — hopefully legally — Grooveshark is running a special from noon to midnight today (EST) charging only 29 cents per song. They are picking up the licensing fees as songs in MP3 format bought through them normally cost $0.99.

Grooveshark is P2P based and say they are paying royalties. For those content owners that they don’t yet have licensing deals, they are holding the money from the purchased music in escrow. When you buy music through Grooveshare, you’re buying it through another member and s/he is now earning 25 cents instead of 10 cents.

I remember trying out a similar, short-lived P2P music service called Peer Impact. I don’t think Peer Impact (PI) ever made it out of beta which is where Grooveshare still remains. PI promised to cut some amount of music sales with members. Not sure if Grooveshark and PI have any history and didn’t check, but my brief experience with PI came immediately to mind when I learned how Grooveshark worked.

Yes, but is it legal?
When it comes to anything music-oriented online these days it’s wise to check the legality. According to Grooveshark, what they are doing is legal and that they will indemnify people who join and use their site to share their music, no matter where the music on their hard drives came from. If that sounds a bit fishy, I’m with you, but the fact that they are charging the current going rate for music makes it smell a little better. If they charged nothing for the downloaded music, I wouldn’t touch this service with a 1000 foot pole.

They are signing deals with different content owners, but their Terms of Service is long-winded and contradictory. When challenged by one of their own members (see link in last paragraph), a Grooveshark representative claimed their lawyers were busy working on a new version of the EULA that will back their indemnification claims:

Yes, our CEO, Sam Tarantino, did say that Grooveshark will indemnify its users. Obviously this is not what the current EULA says. This is because the current EULA was written in March before we had figured out how to handle the selling of unlicensed tracks on our system. The new EULA addresses the issue of user indemnification. The reason the new EULA isn’t up yet basically comes down to lawyers. More specifically, our lawyers. They’re going through it and making sure all the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed. And of course we’re paying them by the hour so they’re taking their sweet time. But don’t worry, we’ve got you guys covered. You will not be held liable.

If you decide to register, don’t delay
I decided to roll the dice and give Grooveshark a try.

Since Grooveshark is still in private beta, it’s recommended to register right away. It took several hours for Grooveshark to send me back an invitation code so I could get in and download their Sharkbyte P2P program (another Grooveshark claim: “no spyware, no adware, no malware”). The text of the site says it can take up to 24 hours to get your invite code back, so if you want to take advantage of the 12 hour special pricing, ask for a code right away.

Once you receive the invite code, finish the registration by picking a username and password and download the Sharkbyte application the next step is to point Sharkbyte to your music directory. This week I’ve been on a mission — or should I write fool’s errand — to organize all our family’s music. I’ve been meticulously ripping the CDs down to MP3 and replacing the missing artwork on songs. I’ve also been creating a few different playlists. This work takes too long.

Sharkbyte shortcomings
After pointing Sharkbyte to my work in progress music directory in iTunes, it started uploading all our music to Grooveshark. Oops. Not what I wanted because everything in the iTunes directory isn’t music. Some are TV shows, for example, and my hmmcasts. I didn’t want my Hmmcasts listed for sale on Grooveshark when anybody can download them freely from here.

I went back and changed, adding only the music subdirectories inside Grooveshark I wanted to share. This isn’t a very good solution either because every time I rip a purchased CD from a new artist, I’ll need to go back into Grooveshark to add the artist or it wouldn’t find it. Unfortunately, if you don’t want to share everything in your master music directory, this appears to be the only solution? A hassle. Somebody have a better solution to manage your music, I’m all eyes and ears.

Sharkbyte has been running since yesterday afternoon and doesn’t tell me where it’s at (only the current song it’s downloading) and/or when it will be done. The hard drive has been chattering non-stop. Is this really necessary, Grooveshark? Why do you need a cached copy of all the music on my hard drive? They claim it’s to be able to deliver the downloads of the music on our hard drives when we’re not online. If that’s the case then Grooveshark isn’t completely peer to peer. The whole point of using P2P is to share bandwidth. If many of the members who have the music at the bitrate you want aren’t online, then you’re pounding away at Grooveshare’s servers instead. More lingering doubts.

Hat tip to Techcrunch who pointed out that Grooveshark has 3.5 million songs. If you take the Grooveshare plunge and especially if you buy some music later today at 29 cents a song, let me know what you think and how it went. After our radio show today, I might do a little shopping myself.

Update 11:42am PST: There is an option to disable caching in the Sharksurf application (uncheck FILE->CACHE MUSIC). Also the promotion runs from Eastern Standard Time, which I added to the text above, so it’s happening as I write this.

Did this post make you go hmm?

Maybe Related Posts (plugin generated)

• Apple won’t reach 100 million music download sales mark
• Listen to Napster streaming songs up to five times for free
• Real hacks download music prices, Apple still feeling unHarmonious
• Legal online music sales PayPal fees reduced, any takers?
• Review: Buymusic.com
• EBay explores music download scene via PassAlong