Unlike the Grooveshark web application, which was always free to use, Grooveshark’s native mobile apps on Android, iOS, BlackBerry, webOS, and Symbian, required a paid Grooveshark Anywhere subscription to access most of their features. Playing songs on demand, creating playlists, adding songs to your library, and so on, required a paid account¹. To encourage subscriptions, the Android and iOS apps offered free, 14-day trials. The Android application’s security features—minimal as they were—were standard for the era but an easy target for hackers looking to use the Grooveshark mobile service for free.

When Grooveshark Lite launched on April 15, 2008, it was a near instant success for the company. After months of anemic signups for our beta Peer-to-Peer paid download site, “Lite,” as we called it, gave us the shot in the arm we needed to stay alive. We soon crossed the 50,000 registered users threshold, putting us back in good graces with one of our biggest investors, who required that we achieve this milestone or else they wouldn’t invest any additional money in the company. The understanding at the time was that without this kind of user growth and additional investment, we wouldn’t survive.

I always felt somewhat guilty whenever I’d return to the office after a long work trip. I got the impression that the development team thought that we’d go to these pseudo-glamorous events and spend 10% of the time working and 90% of the time galavanting about some exotic locale. Let’s put that to rest now—that’s an inaccurate percentage.

It was probably only 80% galavanting.

I was panic-stricken. Finally, the script I’d written to rewrite the entirety of Grooveshark’s music catalog had completed after days of fix-it-and-try-again intervention. But now there were thousands of missing songs, songs which were associated with the wrong artists, empty albums, and other such problems and I didn’t know what had gone wrong. The only thing I could do was put my nose to the grindstone and fix the mess I’d made because there wasn’t time to do anything else.

For a while, an oversized, skull-and-crossbones pirate flag hung from the ceiling in Grooveshark’s Gainesville, FL office. Several years after I’d left the company, and some time after the end of the $17 billion dollar lawsuit brought on by the major record labels which concluded with the company shutting down, I learned that the subject of the flag came up during one of my former colleague’s depositions. As it was told to me, the flag was seen as confirmation of the record labels’ beliefs about Grooveshark’s true intentions. But I know the real story.