Well, not anymore – because then we only have to pay for them once, and that’s not a valid business model in today’s electronics economy….

Both Android and iOS have the same “failure mode”: root/jailbreak, then sideload. The differences between the platforms in terms of actual user freedom are vanishingly small.

It looks like a neat service, but without the support of the labels (which as far as I can tell they don’t have), how can they possibly get far? If it was hosted in Russia or someplace I could understand – it’d be like the modern equivalent of a pirate radio station – but it’s hosted in Florida.

I hope that their efforts do some good and help force change in the music industry, but as it stands they’re enabling copyright infringement on a massive scale. I personally don’t think copyright infringement means much, but I can understand why Google is cautious about allowing it in the market.

And has been noted, the freedom of Android is not that you’re free to put whatever you want on the market. You’re free to install things from other sources. Google has every right to restrict what’s in their market, and in fact they *should* do that, at least in certain cases like this where allowing it would only cause pain for Google.

I use AT&T (family plan), but I have an unlocked Android phone (Nexus One) and I rooted it, installed a custom ROM, etc. So I can install things from outside the market. I won’t be installing Grooveshark, though, because for mobile access they want $9 a month and it doesn’t really seem like it’s legal! At least if it were free (even ad-supported) it wouldn’t seem like extremely un-subtle subversion of the law (as incorrect as the law may be). If that $9 was spread evenly among the artists who you listen to each month, that’d be something else which I could totally get behind, but that’s not what’s happening here.

Android phone with AT&T branding do not allow this, however, but they are the exception.

The very same grooveshark app for Android is freely available to download at their website m.grooveshark.com.

Reps were seriously asking why Google doesn’t fix all the ills in the world and stop all crime and the hearing before that turned into a Google witch trial in absentia.

So they are essentially under huge pressure from politicians in the pocket of big content.

Oh, and you can still side-load the app(s).

http://grooveshark.com/api
http://grooveshark.com/terms
http://grooveshark.com/privacy

I’m not at all surprised that there was some reason to pull it.

To my understanding there are some sizeable tradeoffs when jailbreaking – so much so that its mostly not worth it (battery performance decline among others).