Grooveshark Lands on the iPhone (kinda)

The increasingly popular and controversial streaming music service Grooveshark has released a Spotify-esque on demand song app for the iPhone. There is only one catch… it only works for jailbroken iPhones. Most likely due to the fact that Grooveshark’s free streaming service could cut dramatically into Apple’s iTunes sales, this was an event most people saw coming.

Grooveshark has been controversial due to the fact that they’ve only signed up one of the major recording labels to a contract (EMI), but still chooses to stream music from pretty much every other label out there without permission.

Despite the competition factor, it is assumed that if Grooveshark was solid legally the app would have been approved - proof of this comes from the fact that the European streaming music service Spotify was approved to be on the app store in several nations across the pond.

This is what Techcrunch had to say about the event, “Grooveshark now says it has given up on its ambitions to get approved for the official App Store, claiming that Apple has been “ritually rejecting” the app for “primary selfish reasons”. We’ve heard that song before. The startup says it spent many months developing the iPhone application, and on occasion went months without a hearing a peep out of Cupertino. Denied access to the App Store, Grooveshark decided to head underground and is today releasing the app on Cydia, enabling people who have jailbroken their iPhone and iPod touch devices to enjoy it – and it is actually pretty cool.”