Grooveshark, a DRM-free P2P music store that compensates uploaders each time someone purchases a song from their collection, will only charge $0.29 per song for every song in its catalog today from noon until midnight today (pst). The catalog includes all sorts of copyrighted stuff not available on other stores, including The Beatles (click the image to expand it).
Before you can buy songs, you need to fill your account with a credit card in a $5, $10, or $20 denomination, unless you want to wait for credits to build up as people download music from you. The site declined my debit card, even though the account has money in it (and I used it to buy an iPhone online yesterday -- finally, I know), so I couldn't verify that you can actually buy Beatles songs on the site, but it sure looks like it.
There's a ton of copyrighted stuff on Grooveshark, despite a phrase in the user agreement that asks users to check whether the songs they're sharing are owned by a label with which Grooveshark has a deal:
If you share copyrighted works anyway, you are "solely responsible forany necessary payments that may become due to any third parties as theresult of your posting of or linking to the User Content and EMG's usethereof," according to the site's Terms of Service.
Grooveshark's plan is to make sure "everybody gets paid," it askscopyright owners who believe their songs are being shared withoutpermission to contact Grooveshark to have songs removed, and it does have deals with a number of labels. Still, if the service attracts a large enough school of fish, it's bound to draw the attention of thelabels' own legal sharks... and if it does, users who shared contentcould be held liable, chum.
