October 13, 2009 1:38 PM PDT

EMI, Grooveshark settle lawsuit

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Grooveshark, my favorite free music streaming service, made an important announcement earlier today: the company has settled a lawsuit brought against it by EMI, one of the big four record labels, and has licensed EMI's catalog.

The company is still negotiating terms with other copyright holders, but to my knowledge EMI was the only one that had sued Grooveshark. So with this legal uncertainty out of the way, I can more confidently recommend Grooveshark's $3-a-month premium service, which offers early access to new features (the latest update includes better organization of search results and a slider to move you to particular parts of a song). If other licensing deals follow, Apple might finally approve Grooveshark's planned iPhone app, offering on-demand streams from Grooveshark's massive user-sourced music library.

Matt Rosoff is an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, where he covers Microsoft's consumer products and corporate news. He's written about the technology industry since 1995, and reviewed the first Rio MP3 player for CNET.com in 1998. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattrosoff.

Topics:: Music industry,; Online music services

Tags:: Grooveshark,; EMI

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About Digital Noise: Music and Tech

Matt Rosoff is an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, where he covers Microsoft's consumer products and corporate news. He's written about the technology industry since 1995 and reviewed the first Rio MP3 player for CNET.com in 1998. He's also a bass guitarist and an avid collector (and digitizer) of LP records. DISCLAIMER: This blog contains the personal opinions of the author and does not necessarily represent the opinions of his employers or of CNET Networks. As an IT industry analyst, the author occasionally agrees to nondisclosure agreements from Microsoft or other companies, and he will not violate the terms of such agreements on this blog.

He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET.

Disclosure.

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