Grooveshark responds to Spotify’s claim it’s a ’pirate service’

Grooveshark, the music streaming service still embroiled in multiple lawsuits, has hit back at Spotify CEO Daniel Ek for comparing it to a pirate site.

As reported by TMN yesterday, Ek published a blog post in response to the long-standing debate between Spotify and artists – and to rebut Taylor Swift’s decision to pull her entire catalogue from Spotify.

In the post he said: “You can’t look at Spotify in isolation — even though Taylor can pull her music off Spotify (where we license and pay for every song we’ve ever played), her songs are all over services and sites like YouTube and Soundcloud, where people can listen all they want for free. To say nothing of the fans who will just turn back to pirate services like Grooveshark.”

Now, the Spotify competitor has hit back. James A. Pearson, EVP Corporate Communications at Grooveshark gave Venturebeat a statement, in which he reminds the website’s readers Ek was the co-founder and CEO of uTorrent before its acquisition by BitTorrent, a site that’s renowned for its illegal file-sharing.

Pearson’s statement reads:

“We would normally never comment on a competitive service and their dust-up with one of the world’s most popular artists. But as Spotify’s CEO — who it’s worth mentioning is the recent CEO of uTorrent — an app used by over 100M people, which had similar perception issues — called Grooveshark ‘a pirate service’ in his blog response to Taylor Swift today, we had to comment on that element.

“Copyright laws are complex, and many companies that are now household names in the space such as YouTube, Pandora, and SiriusXM have had to defend themselves at one point or another, just as has Grooveshark. Had Mr. Ek any actual factual information about our business model he would know Grooveshark currently has active licenses with thousands of music labels, publishers, and rights holders, as well as tens of thousands of individual artists. We respect musicians and work to create new ways to get their music heard by a worldwide audience — that’s the driving force behind our existence.”

Taylor Swift’s label Big Machine has also hit back at Ek in an interview with Time. Its CEO Scott Borchetta claims the Grammy winner earned US$496,044 in the past 12 months from US streaming at Spotify, not the much larger number Ek suggested in his blog post: “Payouts for a top artist like Taylor Swift (before she pulled her catalog) are on track to exceed $6 million a year.”